How to lose an election

Political strategists like to proclaim: “Campaigns matter!”

It is our usual caution that elections, where even strong incumbents are concerned, often turn on campaign performance. A cynic might observe, “Strategists always say that, it makes them more important.” But remember Barack Obama’s innovative nomination fight and then his transcendent general election battle? Sadly, for Tim Hudak, the corollary is also true.

Bad campaigns matter, sometimes more.

The McGuinty government should not have been able to achieve even the limited victory it did Thursday night. They avoided humiliation thanks to Hudak’s handlers’ determined effort to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As a former New Democrat strategist, participant in and victim of similarly ham-fisted failures, I know what a disastrous campaign looks like.

Here’s how it is done. First, you set your campaign strategy in concrete a year in advance and refuse to adapt to changed circumstances. Then you fail to inoculate yourself against predictable attacks, and walk into the traps your opponent sets. Finally, you double down on your errors, spending millions of dollars inflicting more bruises on yourself.

That was the Ontario 2011 Hudak campaign. The same folks who fought the last war using their 1999 message in 2003, attacking Dalton McGuinty’s competence, did it again. The planners of this campaign reran their tired tax message of the ’90s as the economy and Ontarians’ confidence was heading into the ditch. The unemployed, and those fearing a winter layoff, are more worried about getting paid than paying taxes.

Premier Dad made unctuous appeals, several times daily, to trust him and his strong leadership. That insensitivity and false humility sent many voters further left and kept many others at home. Turnout fell embarrassingly below 50 per cent for the first time in history. His “bragging bus” criss-crossed the province covered with boasts about the schools, windmills, hospitals and highway miles he had personally delivered. This would not normally have been a wise or successful campaign strategy for a government that had racked up 500,000 unemployed voters and saddled their fellow citizens with $100 billion in provincial debt, in a province that was once again on the verge of a painful recession.

But bad campaigns matter more than tone-deaf or arrogant ones. Hudak first insulted every Ontarian who had ever feared their families being tagged as “foreign,” then the province’s large and influential gay community, and finally all the province’s teachers for allegedly pushing gender-bending propaganda at six-year-olds. It was a curious approach to political coalition building for a minority party seeking to oust a powerful incumbent government. Given that they had been thumped only four years earlier by the same opponent for preaching the politics of division — mostly unfairly, it is true — their flat learning curve was a little astonishing.

Indeed, there are insiders who think that the McGuinty war room dangled the poisoned meat of their rather silly “jobs for foreign PhD cabbies” program deliberately. They may have tempted the Hudak hardheads into doing exactly what the Grits wanted — providing another opportunity to swing the “politics of division” club at Tory heads.

Meanwhile, to the frustration of both men, Andrea Horwath took a page from Ronald Reagan’s book and smiled her way to success. In the debate, she didn’t quite say “There you go again” to her two opponents. But her dismissive maternal gaze at their sound bites said it all. A greenhorn and a first-timer, the NDP leader should not have been able to take her party from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties in popularity for the first time in 15 years.

Her platform may have been constructed with more than a few wobbly planks, her responses to complex questions on climate change and energy pricing, tax policy and fiscal verities may have made both lefty policy wonks and Bay Street wince, but she understood two political fundamentals: likability trumps angry partisanship, and optimism and confidence trump fear. What her opponents will now discover is that she has a steel spine behind that smile.

For election night’s winner, the political axiom to treasure today is this: “Enjoy your first day in office, it gets worse from tomorrow.” When the cabinet secretary’s team leaves the premier’s office, following their first economic briefing late next week, the premier and his team will look at each other and say, “This is victory . . . ?”

Not since Bob Rae had a similar bucket of chilling fiscal news dumped on him will the triumphant glow of election night have evaporated so quickly. And each team has already begun to plan the run-off.