When you lose, you make a new plan. If you go too high, you aim to go lower next time, and vice-versa. That begs a question related to the federal election just called by the new Prime Minister, Mark Carney: if you are the Conservative Party, how do you "do better"? In the 2019 and 2021 Federal elections, the Conservatives won a higher percentage of the vote than any other party but won less seats due to Canada's First Past The Post system. Their campaigns followed a blueprint generated by Ontario Premier Doug Ford: moderation or distance from social issues, and a focus on policy differences with the Trudeau government. It's a good strategy, but not good enough.
If you've paid attention to Canadian politics for the last year or so, you would know that the Conservative Party has since made a sharp shift in rhetoric. Pierre Poilievre's campaign has focused predominantly on character issues and culture war topics, though it will be roughly a month before we can know whether this different approach will work better than the last two.
It's the ultimate question in running a political campaign today: how do you get people to vote for you even though they may disagree with your views? How do you package your beliefs so that people agree with them?
Unfortunately, I adore politics, so this topic is rarely far from my mind — and the response of the Conservative Party to losing two consecutive elections on a technicality is interesting, as it has proven the exact opposite strategy of the current Liberals. Where the Conservative Party has played to its base of conservative voters, the Liberal Party has taken the opposite approach, instead explicitly distancing itself from its former positions, such as the carbon tax, in an attempt to win over voters closer to the "political center." It's a tactic that I've seen often, and it makes me wonder: what does winning "the center" mean? Should that be the goal? Well, I would like to forward the idea that a "moderate" and a "centrist" are, in fact, two very different things.
The term "centrist" is based around the idea that someone's views are between the ideological "left" and "right." Alternatively, a "moderate" implies that their view is the majority consensus among society. Naturally, these two notions are not necessarily equal at all times, and it is the objective of the political party to triangulate where the "moderate" that can feasibly be swayed their way is to be found.
Consider the recently elected President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum. In Mexico today, there are three major political parties.
The first is "PAN", a broadly conservative party, the second is a center-left party, "MC", and the third is "MORENA," a further left-wing party. In last year's election, Sheinbaum won in a landslide, elected with 61% of the vote — as a member of MORENA. Not only that, but her alliance also received overwhelming majorities in both houses of the legislature. Even though her party is furthest from the center of the three, her recent 80% approval rating among Mexicans tells that she is evidently closer to a "moderate" than her opposition. How? To understand this, let's look at another good example, this time to the opposite effect: the 2024 American Presidential election.
What is on the mind of an electorate is very difficult to identify, even after the ballots are counted and a winner is inaugurated, but what I believe was clearest on the minds of most voters last November was that of "change." For the first time in his eight years in politics, a majority of voters picked Donald Trump to be their President, and there's a good reason as to why. Most people were sick and tired of the Biden Presidency and wanted something new to replace it, something that would be tangibly different from the constant waves of inflation, wars abroad, and seeming incompetence of their Commander-in-Chief. It's why Biden dropping out of the race and Kamala coming in was such a miracle for the Democratic Party: it was an opportunity to run someone new in an election begging for exactly that.
Neither party ran an especially good campaign last year, but Trump was able to sell his commitment to change better than Kamala did — and as inevitably happens after any American election, the losers are tearing themselves apart about which part of the party is responsible for abandoning the Average Joe and why, whether it's over worker's rights or Trans rights. The frank truth is, the voting people were looking for a change of pace, a steady hand after four years of turbulent waves, and they remember the first Trump years as being exactly that, flaws and all. As for whether Trump is able to actually be that steady hand, whether Sheinbaum is, and whether Carney or Poilievre are able to become that for the voters, all remains to be seen.
What I do know, though, is that whoever realizes first that the votes aren't necessarily in the center of the map could win themselves more than just an election.
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