Another Canadian election (2nd one in 18 months) has recently wrapped up with a marginal victory going to the Conservatives.
There weren’t many highlights of interest for online political campaigners. The Canadian political sphere has not been impacted by the Internet in the same way that the 2004 election in the US inspired a whole new generation of online political tools and tactics. A report recently posted by Hillwatch.com offers some analysis of the election websites of Canadian political parties in this past election:
“Canadian political web sites lag their US and UK counterparts. Canadian party web sites demonstrate a more strategic use of the internet relative to their efforts in the 2004 election. Nevertheless, their online strategies are not as ambitious as their UK or US counterparts. This is particularly underscored in the way the UK and US make use of the channel to deliver highly targeted, regionally specific content, support grassroots initiatives, and raise funds.”
http://www.hillwatch.com/Publications/Research/Still_Virtually_Lawn_Signs.aspx
On a smaller scale, I want to highlight some of my own involvement in the campaign. I was part of the election team of the local NDP candidate (www.peggynash.ca) in my former neighbourhood in Toronto (I recently moved to Ottawa). I was in charge of the campaign website and email list/newsletter.
Normally I would generally not place high importance on the role of internet in a local election campaign. Local election contests are still largely face-to-face, handshake-to-handshake battles that are fought on the streets and doorsteps, and while it’s true these days that almost all election candidates have some form of a website, it’s not necessarily a key part of the winning strategy.
However, in the downtown Toronto riding of Parkdale-High Park we had a couple of interesting things happen that point to the increasing role that the internet is assuming in the Canadian election landscape.
1) Email “Ask your candidate” campaigns
Early on we noticed we were receiving streams of emails from individual people who were using “email your candidate” web pages that were set up by advocacy groups and organizations. The highest number of individual emails (more than 100) came from the Make Poverty History movement, but we also received dozens of emails related to arts and culture causes as well as other social justice issues such as homelessness and child care.
I’ve been involved on the organizing side of these send-a-message-to-your-candidate campaigns, but this was the first time I’d been on the receiving end. It didn’t take us long to realize that this was something of a windfall - voters within our riding were using the internet to actually step forward and identify themselves and the issue(s) that most concerned them.
So we set up a system for generating customized email responses to send back to these inquiries, making an intentional effort to engage these voters online and encourage them to support our candidate’s position (and subscribe to our campaign enewsletter). I don’t have detailed numbers at this point, but we received numerous messages back indicating that our email responses were key to encouraging voters to support our candidate. In some cases, voters reported that we were the only campaign that sent back an answer.
The challenge in an upcoming campaign would be establish a data management system so that information about these self-identifying voters was being passed to the door-to-door and phone canvas teams — that sort of deep-integration of data could lead to some impressive results ..
2) Blogging controversy
Unexpectedly, our riding became one of the internet/blogging hotspots of the election campaign. Our main opponent, the incumbent Liberal candidate, Sarmite Bulte, became mired in a controversy about her close ties to Canada’s recording industry lobby, and her industry-friendly stance on copyright legislation that had already made her unpopular among Fair-Use supporters. The issue started in the blogosphere, where University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist highlighted an apparent conflict of interest in a fundraising event planned for Bulte’s campaign that was being supported by recording industry lobbyists. This article was picked up on the popular Boing Boing blog, and from there is continued to spin until it eventually broke into the mainstream media. It was never more than a minor footnote in the national election campaign, but it generated a lot of internet buzz. Here are a couple of links outlining how things evolved:
http://michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1086&Itemid=85
http://northworthy.blogspot.com/2006/01/blogs-dont-get-credit-they-deserve.html
From the point of view inside our campaign, we felt the controversy created an opportunity - though not necessarily a strong one - to gain some advantage on our opponent. The issue at the core of the blogosphere buzz was our opponent’s stance on artistic/creative copyright, which is a complicated and technical issue - not one that the average voter is able to judge very easily. Our campaign strategists decided to focus just on the conflict-of-interest angle, which played to voters’ perception of the candidate’s credibility, and avoid getting our candidate caught up in the complexities of the copyright issue. This somewhat frustrated the bloggers who were rallying against Bulte, but as one blogger put it “the best way to stop Bulte’s copyright legislation is to beat her at the local polls in Parkdale-High Park”. And, in the end, we were successful.
One commentator has noted in particular the failing of our opponent to deal effectively with the churning of the issue in the blogosphere. She relied on old-style mainstream approaches (press releases, media interviews and all-candidate meetings) to try to counter-spin the story.
Just out of interest, web traffic to our website during the campaign averaged about 75 visits per day until the first Boing Boing blog post at the start of January - then the visits tripled and quadrupled through the rest of the campaign as the story continued to generate buzz. We topped out at more than 1,000 visits on the election day.
3) List building to Get Out the Vote (GOTV)
It’s a small note to add that, like any campaign anywhere, the primary focus of our internet strategy was to build the email mailing list toward delivering our GOTV message on election day. We began the campaign with an active mailing list just under 500, and built that list to more than 1,000 by collecting email addresses via website signups, telephone canvas, and door-to-door voter contact. On election day our Get-Out-There-And-Vote email was opened by more than 500 local voters. A smallish contribution to success, but it points to the growing integration of email and web into the overall election-winning strategy.
