Lessons for Canadian political organizers from the 2024 US Presidential Election

I have some thoughts.

Donald Trump - twice impeached, thirty-four times convicted – has won the U.S. Presidential election and a lot of people are deep in their feelings on this one.

But let’s move past the feelings and ask ourselves – how has our understanding of politics changed or been reinforced by this election?

After all, Canadian politics is just U.S. politics on time delay and the political organizer class needs to take a hard look at what happened. So whether you want to recreate the Trump win or resist it, here’s six lessons from the U.S. Presidential election:

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1. People see democracy as a means, not an end.

Thirty-five years out from the Cold War, the perception of democracy having intrinsic value is badly damaged. Polling continues to show an increase in support for authoritarianism – an increase tied to feelings the system is not working for them. People want results, not a critique on the reverence for the system that gets or doesn’t get results. The “he’s a tyrant!” well is dry.

Long term, an increased focus on civics is needed. Long term, the only path to shared prosperity we have is liberal democracy; we need to relearn the lesson that a commitment to democratic norms protects us all. But this is a generational challenge. For the next few elections, political organizers need to find something more electorally effective than banging that drum.

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2. The economy and safety are how people feel, not charts and data.

Almost everything said the U.S. economy was actually doing very well. Yes, inflation was high, but wage growth was faster. But people didn’t feel it. Housing felt more out of reach. Opportunity felt less available. Side hustles have become the norm for a generation of young adults and everything feels horribly precarious: the number of Americans that couldn’t absorb an unexpected $2000 cost is alarming.

Similarly, charts showed crime was declining across America. But the feelings of urban decline were real – and tied to the point about the economy. The Fentanyl crisis has exacerbated a housing crisis. All of this has been far too visible on our streets and creating huge senses of discomfort at the very bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Arguing that it’s not a growing problem – bringing all the data to back that point – was thoroughly ineffective. People felt the economy and safety were a problem, and they voted accordingly.

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3. Virtue politics have given incredible ammunition to the right.

A caricature of progressives has taken hold – obsessed with “woke” policies, disinterested in the issues that matter to you, the voter.

There are no doubt cases where the Democrats picked issues that failed to resonate – abortion appears to be the primary one (an example of their organizers fighting the last campaign – the 2022 midterm election – rather than the current one). But any fair read of policies would show the vast weight of Democratic focus was on issues with well understood resonance.

All to say, I don’t think the left is lost. But I do think it’s easy to make the left look lost.

Love it or hate it, it’s clear that the views and attitudes of the leftward flank of progressive parties are more disqualifying to the average voter than the views of the rightward flank of conservative parties.

My personal view is inclusiveness is good. But my political assessment is moralizing about inclusiveness, even in small doses, is a very bad strategy. It provides the foundation for attack ads that can create an outsized sense of focus on issues that not only fail to land with many voters, but actively concern them or turn them away.

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4. Polls are broken.

I feel for pollsters. Even when they’re within a reasonable margin of error, they can appear horribly wrong. That’s the nature of elections decided by 1% of the vote. That’s the nature of 19 times out of 20.

But pollsters also largely failed, for the third straight election with Trump on the ballot, to see the currents. He once again out performed. This is after corrections post 2016 and corrections post 2020. At this point, most pollsters are simply weighting against the factors relevant to the last election and hoping like hell they still matter.

It’s clear they don’t.

Meanwhile, I’m beginning to strongly suspect that partisans – having discovered the propaganda value of a good poll – are actively seeking out participation and ruining their usefulness. This is Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

In the most recent elections in BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan the batch of polls from just BEFORE the writ dropped were more predictive of the result than the final polls. It may too be the case in the U.S. that the polls before Biden dropped out were more predictive. It may be that, once the game begins, the usefulness of polling plummets.

This isn’t a purely theoretical observation. Polling drives decision making. And bad polls are driving campaigns to allocate resources poorly and make decisions that land flat – or with the wrong group.

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5. Campaigns are broken.

As former Alberta NDP MLA Shannon Phillips put it on the morning-of-the-day-after, “we do NOT understand how to reach people and even more than that, we don’t even know how the Right are reaching people in 2024. Our tactics are old and wrong”.

I agree but I’d go further – I’m not convinced most on the right know how to reach people either. Campaigns of all stripes are chasing inaccurate polls, using tactics that made sense in 1990 and talking to themselves in echo chambers.

We do not have a strong grasp on how information is consumed and voting decisions are made in 2024.

Campaigns of all stripes continue allocating resources to ground game that looks increasingly like a bad investment. By plan or incompetence, Donald Trump seems to have stumbled upon an optimal strategy of indifference and disregard to regular canvass and get-out-the-vote activities. That freed up a lot of money and focus for other activities.

You see, canvass is broadly misunderstood by the general public. The purpose of door knocking in a campaign is not to change your mind, it’s to identify supporters. The campaign will then do whatever it can to get you, the supporters identified, to the ballot box. They’ll call. They’ll show up at your door. They’ll offer to watch your kids or drive you. And maybe that was really important when elections were one day affairs. But maybe, now that you have a week of days to vote, if you care enough to answer the door you care enough to show up anyhow. Maybe it’s all a waste of time.

But let me not just pick on canvass. Where do people advertise? Why? What media outlets are they using? Why?

The modern campaign has no theory of change. They do not know how they think they change minds. They make small, micro-targeted swings to win the game of inches. Meanwhile, they ignore or under-resource the game of yards dictated by story and emotion.

They do this through traditional channels. And sorry, Millenials, YouTube and X are now traditional channels. Modern campaigns are lost.

As noted above – polls before the election are in so many recent cases more predictive than polls at the end of the election. That’s not just a condemnation of polling. That’s a condemnation of campaigns, which appear unable to move opinion in meaningful ways.

Campaigns are begging for a fundamental rethink.

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6. To save democracy in our nation, we need to end democracy in our political parties.

If we want to resist unchecked populism and factionalism in our national elections, we need to end it in our parties. They’re too small, too easy to take control of through motivated short-term or narrow interests.

I used to think the solution was to throw the doors wide open and invite more people. I used to think the solution was small donations and broad support. It’s now clear to me that only a certain type of person will walk through that door. It’s now clear to me only high emotion generates small donations in useful amounts.

Parties need to operate more like private clubs and step outside of the democratic framework. Party leaders being chosen by popular support has not been healthy for democracies here or in the United States.

Parties need to be built to defend moderate views, not be highjacked by the most motivated.

Return to delegated conventions. Reduce the number of elected delegates. Give caucuses power over party leadership. Give party brokers power over the selection of candidates.

Acknowledge that our current system drives parties to the extremes, which then makes our general elections choices between extremes.

And governments – end the restrictive fundraising rules. Let corporations and unions donate again. Increase the limits.

Let money flow through our democratic systems rather than around them and under them through third party advertisers and political action committees. Break the addiction to rage-fueled small donations that all parties have. If you want to make our politics moderate, normal and boring, you must find ways to make our parties normal and boring.

Our current parties are too valuable a prize and too weakly defended. Rather than groups pushing coherent ideologies, they have become loose confederations of interest groups to be bought off by charismatic outsiders. That’s not healthy.

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Canada sometimes feels like a very small boat on a very big ocean. But we have the advantage of seeing the waves coming.

It’s now up to us to decide what we do to get ready for them.

Corey Hogan