It’s something I wrote early in the campaign when it seemed that no reporter or pundit could open their mouth without the words “Facebook” or “Twitter” popping out. There were even some declaring that as ’06 was the “blog election” and ’08 the “Facebook election”, that 2011 would the known as the “Twitter election”.
I disagreed, mostly because I know more about the role of blogs and the nature of online political discussion – then and now – than pretty much anybody else in the room. On April 6, I shared a few thoughts in an email to a friend in old media;
Unlike most in formal media, my real life has a very small overlap with politicians and journalists, and a huge overlap with people of all political stripes who seldom discuss them. My readers are people with a common interest in politics, as opposed to a common connection to it.
They (my blog readers) don’t use Twitter – they’re even a little turned off when I reference it. None of my personal friends use Twitter. Furthermore, none of the hundreds of people I know in dog sport are on Twitter.
The platform has a place as a fast communication vehicle for those inside the machine – but as a means for parties to engage the average voter? I’d say stop wasting your time.
Facebook has a different problem. The people we connect to most are friends and family. In my case, it’s peers and competitors in the dog world. Political discussion is very, very rare because it invariably causes friction – and Facebook hates friction.
For the average user (who are primarily women, by the way) – Facebook is about positive reinforcement. There may be plenty of FB political groups, but I see precious little cross-pollination of election talk into Facebook proper.
Political junkies will always be junkies, but they’re a minority simply moving around from platform to platform.
There’s way too much coverage of social media, way too little reporters shutting their own mouths for a change and listening to people on the street.
I’ll let you in on a little secret – about the time the punditocracy was authoritatively informing Canadians that high turnout at the advance polls was “a bad sign for the incumbent”, I got word that it was the work of the Conservative ground game, and that the party was pretty confident about how things were going.
I had no way of knowing if that was true until Monday, when SDA readers began reporting light to moderate turnout at your respective polling places. Maybe voters weren’t as motivated to “throw the bums out” as the excited few inside the Twitter echo chamber had willed themselves to believe.
There is no “blog election” or “Facebook election” or “Twitter election” for people who don’t eat, sleep and breathe politics. There’s a reason for that – the majority of Canadians don’t live with their faces glued to a screen. They’re out there driving truck, behind welding masks, hauling kids to hockey practice. They have neither the time or opportunity to follow Andrew Coyne’s multi-tweet essays on parliamentary history, Kady O’Malley’s tortured indifference to Jack Layton’s happy ending, or to engage The Phantom in the comments section at SDA.
When it comes to the mechanics of winning elections, it’s the ground game, stupid. And it will always be the ground game.
At any rate, Margaret Wente has written a pretty good column that ties up the loose ends, if you’re interested.
Wow – thank you for your insightful blog post. Duh. This is so obvious (see Ford in Toronto). But social media is playing an increasing important role in campaigns and blogs like, small dead animals, are increasingly lost in the noise. But this blog is just a way to amplify conservative talking points so, therefore, increasingly irrelevant. Not tons of original thought coming from this blog. Signed, a former fan of this irrelevant blog and current conservative
For the Edmonton and northern Alberta residents, think of the new NDP caucus as “Popcorn Playhouse”. Jack Layton is “Klondike Eric” and the studio audience is the newly elected snot noses from Quebec!
“There may be plenty of FB political groups, but I see precious little cross-pollination of election talk into Facebook proper.”
Very True. I’ve a couple young relatives who early on started spouting trash talk and silly votemob slogans on facebook. Didn’t last long once a couple adults challenged the propaganda and rhetoric. It’s hard to be a obnoxious little Marxist when you get a spanking from grandpa in front of your +500 university comrades on the friends list.
The clear fact is that the Conservatives are dominant at this point in the RoC while barely a force in la belle province. Moreover Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia are in line to receive significant numbers of new seats to reflect their increase in population. Most of those seats will be suburban ones, just the sort of seat very likely to be picked up by the Conservatives. So it seem probable that their dominance in the RoC will increase; meanwhile it is hard to see any great breakthrough for them in Québec in light of the three most recent federal election results there.
I was thinking the same thing, Mark. As I understand the seat distribution, it will be 5 for AB, 7 for BC, and 18 for ON for a total of 30 seats. If one were to speculate how things might have gone on Monday if these seats had already been in place, one might guess that the CPC would take the 5 for AB and, say, 12 of the others (that’s just shy of 50% of the added seats in BC and ON). We’ll toss 7 of the remaining seats to the NDP and 6 to the Liberals. That would have made the vote totals in the 338 seat House of Commons:
CPC 184
NDP 109
LPC 40
BQ 4
GPC 1
Who knows how the next election will turn out, but right now, it’s a good time to be a conservative and a Conservative in Canada.
I was busy erecting signs for my MP Dave Mackenzie to have time to “twitter”.
The real miracle in this life in my view is the internet, which has given the individual freedom from the gate keeping leftist Canadian MSM.
And Jack Layton is still a communist!
Spectacular insight.
Kate has written what I consider her best post to date. Where is the [LIKE] button?
Cannot overstate how much Kate “GET’S IT” with this home run.
Simple exceptional — well done!
s/GET’S/GETS
(blush)
@ CPC supporter:
Where can we read your timely and so well written thoughts on the human condition?
>crickets chirping
Nice analysis, Mark. But you need to be taken to the woodshed for using that dreadful “Rest of Canada” construction. That’s how the worthless, disgusting, navel-gazing Quebecois refer to us. Don’t buy into it! Are you really OK with the tail wagging the dog?
I have proposed this before, and I will do it again, and again: Delete “Rest of Canada” and substitute “Greater Canada”, that being all of Canada excluding Quebec. If the election of May 2 had any lesson for us at all, it is that it is now proven that you do not need seats in Quebec to form a majority government.
This election has seen Quebec cease to be a major partner in Confederation, becoming instead a quaint Ruritanian backwater on the shores of the St. Lawrence. When the reality of this sinks in amongst the people, expect a renewed call for Quebec to separate.
It;s time for us in Greater Canada to start thinking about the terms that WE will dictate to Quebec to allow their independence.
Side note:
Ease up on the generalizations regarding Quebec, people.
Some of us are scared sh!tless and are more than a little worried about this ridiculous situation.
I’m one of them — and I’m Canadian FIRST, LAST, and IN BETWEEN, Iggy, you pompous a-hole.
And, no guys & gals, I don’t have a good answer. I’m stunned by this whole mess. 🙁
Great. Now I have to confront the fact that facebook and twitter being such a part of my life means that I don’t in fact have a life. Thanks Kate.
I spent the last few weeks running the CPC campaign office in the Municipality of North Grenville, part of the riding of Leeds-Grenville. Our candidate, the incumbent MP Gord Brown, was returned with just over 60% of the vote. This morning I had coffee with a group that included the DRO for the advanced poll. He confirmed Kate’s premise that the large turnout for the advanced poll was made up of mostly CPC voters.
The discussion then turned to why the Liberal candidate placed third, behind Gord and the NDP candidate who could not campaign during the days as he was working. On the surface the Grit candidate was an attractive choice, at least from the point of view of a political party. She had worked in the Chretien PMO, was well educated including a recent PhD and had campaigned long and hard back starting in 2010. However her message did not seem to resonate with Joe and Jane Lunchbox. She seemed to talk over their heads in a style that would have worked in a board room, but not so much in a lunch room. It was a bit like like Marks and Spencer trying to steal customers from Giant Tiger. Maybe, after all, that was the trouble with the Grits’ message in 2011.
The groundgame, in reality is a tried and true system, that pays off. Its real name is “WORK”.
Of course Librannos don’t know how to use this tool.The attitude “I’m from Harvard,and I know better(remember “BEER and POPCORN”)doesn’t cut it. The poorly thought out gaffs,and lack of, hmmm, lemmee see, FUNDRAISING effort, show how deep the sense of entitlement is in these people. Empty suits all of them, Turdough especially.
Love that word entitlement…
Where was the great CPC ground game in QC when it mattered?
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/05/05/ndp-respects-quebec-sovereignty-says-newly-elected-mp/
COAB.
Kate, you are 100% correct! Thank you for the excellent blog!
Brian from Kemptville: My sister was the Green Party candidate! Worked hard for a long time yet vote went down 50%.
Mark
Ottawa
The ground game is just hard work, which is blasphemy, heresy and sacrilege to the left, who don’t know how to do it. Neither Iggy nor Jack know anything about work.
soundofmusak asks “Where was the great CPC ground game in QC when it mattered?”
It didn’t matter. And the urban myth that you can’t have a majority government in Canada without Quebec has been exposed as a lie.
Try as I might, I still don’t “get” Twitter.
Mark
Your sister came around to our house canvassing the weekend before the election. She and my wife chatted for quite a while. My wife recalls your sister told her she knew she did not have a chance of winning, and Gord Brown was both a very nice guy and a good candidate, but she was running to make a statement.
I think the vote decreased for all three parties, although the NDP’s share went up a bit.
In all of the talk about the Orange surge, something I haven’t seen reported is how the Green’s vote dropped by 50 %. In the 2008 election they got about 6% of the vote total, this time they were just under 4%. I guess that is because of all the grass roots work by their members and volunteers.
On election night, in her moment of fame on TV, Liz M was rattling on thanking all the volunteers working for her in the riding, they numbered in the thousands, if she is to be believed. I had to wonder were they brought in from all over the country, and did they cast ballots for her in her riding instead of their own. ??? 😉
Jethro, Bill Elder:
I worked on the Conservative candidate’s campaign last time around (I was in the US on business most of this one).
The database was horrible – and as someone who’s a SQL programmer, I know whereof I speak.
There were so many DEAD people on the list, wrong numbers (we were often told that people had moved 4-5 years ago), wrong names, etc. It was a joke.
I’m glad the Tories won, but don’t put it down to superior software. What they have is terrible.
Looks like Iggy was just hired by the U of T. I hope he won’t be teaching political science. That would be like having an engineering professor who was fired from his previous job because one of his bridges collapsed.
I guess he didn’t come back for me after all. *sniff*
For the average user (who are primarily women, by the way) – Facebook is about positive reinforcement……..
Gaggingly so…. and is precisely the reason I opted out.
Twitter, OTOH, when I venture there, I can locate the things that I’m interested in and some cool links to things I didn’t know existed.
Blogs, Twitter, F.B…….something for everyone to stay connected. They all seem to have their place at one time or another and like everything else….Reader beware.
Oh My God! (OMG?)
This sucks – here I am at work with my nose glued to a computer screen (on personal time of course!) reading your blog! (I knew I should have become a trucker!)
Reading Wente’s column in the G&M and the comments, I saw again the silly whine that 60% voted against Harper.
This inspired me to fool around on Excel with proportional representation. If we do it for all Canada, the NDP has to give back 9 seats. If we do PR for just Quebec it has to give back 27 seats.
I’ll bet we don’t hear much more from the NDP about the desirability of PR!
As “Eskimo” said,Ignatieff’s just been hired by the U.of Toronto. Isn’t that a bit of a comedown from Harvard.
Like coaching in the AHL after five years in the NHL?
Patrick Armstrong
Very Interesting. I’m keeping that in mind for future reference.Thanks
People did`nt vote LPC because of what they said it was becuse Iggy was a twit. He had no id of what people wanted. He told us! Harper is one of us and knows what is importent to us. HE LISTENS TO THE PEOPLE. That was why the people care for Harper.Whorehouse Jack ?? Good bye. Just the thoughts of an old man.
I had a couple of mini-debates with friends on Facebook during the campaign. They would post pro-NDP “Cult of Jack” slogans, and I would counter with a link to an article full of facts and numbers.
One friend posted a link to CBC’s Vote Compass tool, telling everyone to check it out because it made her “re-evaluate” who she would vote for… I commented on that by posting a link to one of the several articles showing the Liberal bias to the tool. She deleted my posting almost immediately. lol
Did I change anyone’s minds with anything I posted on my Facebook page? Directly, no, I doubt it. Did I get anyone to at least read some articles and educate themselves on what’s going on? Hopefully.
All I know about twitter is that it involves cell phone messages. I pay $0.25/message so I obviously try to keep texting limited to work related texts and communicating with friends. From the twitter material I saw, it is in general useless.
A lot of the people I know seem to be on FB given the number of FB invitations I get. I refuse to participate in this endeavor as what immediately becomes obvious is who you know. I keep my internet postings anonymous and know that it would take just one half-pissed facebook addition to worry about for the rest of my career.
The other disadvantage of twitter is that messages seem to be 160 characters at most. One of the reasons I went away from TV news is that the actual information content of TV news was miniscule (not counting all the Mb that it takes to display the photographs that usually have minimal relevance to the story). What I like about SDA is that there is a great depth of information; if it’s not provided in the original posting and links, SDA commentators will usually provide even more information resulting in a depth of news coverage that is just not possible in the MSM.
What people in the MSM appear to be doing is listening only to themselves or the politicians they are covering. What reporters should be doing is to go to places where people congregate and ask questions and, most importantly, listen. This seems to no longer be in fashion.
Mercules, my experience exactly.
“As “Eskimo” said,Ignatieff’s just been hired by the U.of Toronto. Isn’t that a bit of a comedown from Harvard.
Like coaching in the AHL after five years in the NHL?”
Don’t be insulting to the AHL.
I’d say Iggy’s demotion is like being sent to the IHL or ECHL.
There were 145 candidates that got more than 50% of the votes in their riding’s. As follows:
107 Conservative (167) or 64%
36 NDP (102) or 35.3%
2 Liberals (34) or 5.9%
BTW: I get a real chuckle when I see someone show up for a day of walleye hunting with a tackle box full of gear with the price tags still on them.
Isn’t that a bit of a comedown from Harvard.
The correct spelling is condom.
A lot of us rural Ontario folk sat out the Federal election. By and large, we already knew our CPC candidates were “safe”. We have other issues provincially, and the Federal vote was a diversion.
We are celebrating the results non the less, because it appears that adults came to vote. Stephen Harper guided us through the worst recession ever, and deserved to be rewarded. Liberals demonstrated that triviality was more important than reality, which gave voters the opportunity to vote for the real New Triviality Party. The Bloc was already dieing after 20 years of futile protest, purvoir les voteur, on voté pour la vraie Noveau Partie Futilité.
Ontario put the adults in Ottawa in charge. Our focus is McGuinty. Opened your hydro bill lately?
Noel at 3:30pm – I was thinking that myself. Lizzie getting in is supposedley historic, but like you said the Greens went down 50% in popular vote share, and they gain no advantage from oficial party status since 1 seat doesn’t get there. I suspect that Lizzie spent almost all the vote subsidy money on herself, and the Green party suffered overall because of her me, me, me attitude.
Re this comment:
There were 145 candidates that got more than 50% of the votes in their riding’s. As follows:
107 Conservative (167) or 64%
36 NDP (102) or 35.3%
2 Liberals (34) or 5.9%
How many of the NDP who poled over 50% were in Quebec?
Just cause there is a bit of the Redneck in me–
And I want to see if this posts–
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xpeami317s
A bouquet flowers to Kate. She is right on. I voted in the advance polls. They where full.
Most conservatives of all ethnic stripes except one exception.
Its human nature. The more attention you get on a personnel level, the more you associate with the people who are there.
JMO
If that post worked, it was a tribute to the NDP
And those that will destroy them in the next election.
Infintiy,
Nice stat…..sort of tells you the cons are going be very difficult to dislodge. Hard to see someone with those numbers losing in one election. So thats a base of 107 seats in the bag, so to speak. Means 48 seats they have to grab. Makes concentrating resources a lot easier.
But wow they are dug in deep
And another.
Once upon a time he supported the US invasion of Iraq.
Then he came to Canada and decided that he didn’t.
Which are we supposed to believe: then or now?
Now that he’s no longer Mr Liberal, stay tuned.
We can be sure that Dion will approve of the results.
Infintiy,
Nice stat…..sort of tells you the cons are going be very difficult to dislodge. Hard to see someone with those numbers losing in one election. So thats a base of 107 seats in the bag, so to speak. Means 48 seats they have to grab. Makes concentrating resources a lot easier.
But wow they are dug in deep
Thanks Kate and Maggie.
The Tories did focus on the GOTV in the early votes. I received three calls on Easter weekend telling me to vote now so they could concentrate on fence sitters (my words) on election day.
Harper has brought organization to the conservative forces in this country. He is a transformative figure in the movement and will be remembered as such.
Wente’s article is spot on. It wasn’t so much an orange surge as a pale blue purge.
I finally got a chance to read Wente’s column. It is pretty good. Robert Fulford wrote one last weekend that is generally similar although it specifically names Atwood and The Annex
Robert Fulford: Margaret Atwood’s herd of independent minds
“This is not an overly subtle way of saying that those who think as she does are on the side of decency and goodness. The rest of you people (that would be the Conservatives) aren’t. That goes far beyond Atwood’s normal, highly admirable poise and evolves into political self-righteousness.
…
Atwood is an independent thinker, highly original in fact, who just happens, by coincidence, to think of politics precisely the way the rest of the Annex thinks. And the Annex, in return, thinks what she thinks. The Annex is a lesson to us all, one place in Canada that proves people can set aside their differences and come together in the common pursuit of decency. Borrowing the phrase of an American author, you could accurately call Annex dwellers the herd of independent minds.”
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/04/30/robert-fulford-margaret-atwoods-herd-or-independent-minds/
* before Davenport and co. can beat me to it – Yes, SDA can also be conformist but, as Kate mentioned, commenters do seem to mingle more often with people other than those in similar occupations.
Regarding Twitter, I have been using it for a bit over 2 years now.
I find it very useful in connecting with my business contacts, but where it is really informative is for fast breaking news.
During the Calgary election last fall, I was getting the news way ahead of the TV stations here in Calgary with the results, and the swing towards Nenshi being elected as mayor.
The same thing this past Monday night, I had a search going on #tweettheresults and was seeing the news and numbers coming in long before TV was allowed to begin showing the results from eastern Canada here in Calgary.
I was also following some of the political commentators on it, as they posted, or re-tweet gems of wisdom, or stupid statements made on the news channels.
The media made much about how Myaor Nenshi ran a Twitter election, but if you analyze what his campaign did, he made the initial contact with it, but it was the one on one discussion, and listening to people, face to face, that swung the vote his way. The other candidates used it to say “Read a press release here” or “Come hear the candidate speak at a meeting” they didn’t engage with the public.
I am sneaking up on 60 years of age, but I “get” Twitter. It can be a powerful, useful tool.
Atwood writes unreadable books. We seem to provide the world with lots of those. Proulx, Ondaatje etc.
Who cares about her opinion? I do not.