Old tricks brought Liberals a fresh win
Online life is great, especially in a pandemic. But in-person life is far superior, most would agree after a year and a half of living through COVID-19.
Will Canada’s 44th election — the most virtual one in history — be remembered for that lesson, too?
All the major political parties are sifting through the results of Monday’s vote and the fiveweek campaign that preceded it. One of the things they are trying to figure out is whether all the online innovation — pandemic-induced, in large part — really paid any dividends.
The Conservatives leaned heavily on virtual town-hall meetings and a simulated campaign stage set up in an Ottawa hotel ballroom for Erin O’Toole. New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh launched himself into the world of TikTok videos and online gaming in a big way.
Both of those parties are still in opposition after Monday’s vote. So is that a verdict on the virtual? Yes and no, the campaign pros are saying at this early stage.
Online campaigning is here to stay, they say, and it still could spell the difference between victory and defeat. But how the parties use the digital realm is what distinguishes a winning campaign from a losing one.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have been running a sophisticated
digital operation for the past six years, headed up by Tom Pitfield and his team at Data Sciences, and it delivered again on Monday night — just as it did in 2015 and 2019.
An expected narrow victory by the Liberals, something in the range of 140 seats, turned into numbers hovering near 160 by the time Monday night was over. Once again, Liberal red was splashing all over the political map in targeted, closely fought ridings.
The numbers being compiled by the party tell the story: In 20 ridings where the winning margin was less than three percentage points, Liberals won 15, compared with only three for the Bloc Québécois, two for the Conservatives and zero for the NDP.
As Pitfield explained it to me
on Thursday, this is a product of digital data being able to identify those close ridings, and then working with the traditional field operations to concentrate resources where the candidates are within striking distance of victory.
Some of that outreach is done on doorsteps or in person — “old-fashioned hustle,” as the headline said on the Star story this week by Tonda MacCharles and Stephanie Levitz that dissected how the Liberals won.
But Pitfield said the Liberals are also able to use the digital realm to target ads and getout-the-vote messages. In a few of the ridings identified as tight but possible wins in the final weeks of the campaign, the Liberals’ field (real-life) operations were sparse on the
ground, so online was the ideal way to reach them, Pitfield said.
Liberals doing the early campaign analysis are looking as well at how they used Facebook advertising, compared with their rivals.
Here is a taste of that analysis, provided to me on Thursday by party officials:
“The Facebook ad library shows that in the 90 days before election day, the Liberal campaign invested $4.12 million on Facebook and Instagram (nearly as much as the other two parties combined), compared to $2.63 million for the Conservative campaign, and $2.13 million for the NDP campaign.”
As well, Liberals say, their party had more than 14,800 iterations of Facebook ads in that same time frame, compared with about 1,400 for the Conservatives and 1,250 for the NDP.
Over at the NDP, they’re still crunching numbers, trying to figure out why Singh’s unprecedented, innovative ways of working online failed to yield the big gains the party was seeking in Monday’s election. The NDP did expand its share of the popular vote, preliminary numbers show, while other parties shrank.
“It was a low turnout election,” NDP national director Anne McGrath said, and some of that, she is sure, depressed the vote among young people and new voters that Singh was trying to reach. Would the party rely on online as heavily in the future as it did in this campaign? Yes, McGrath said. “We have to find these voters where they live, and many of them live online.”
O’Toole has launched a formal process to review the Conservatives’ election effort, so it remains to be seen whether his party will call its virtual campaign techniques a success.
The real trick, it seems, is to make sure that the online effort runs in tandem with the “old-fashioned hustle” of a regular campaign — that actual voters who intend to cast ballots are on the other side of the screen.
There is a difference between getting someone’s attention online and getting their commitment in person. But after 18 months of a pandemic, a lot of Canadians know that already.