Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (37 page)

Taylor would tell partisans and business clients the same thing about the need to do data mining: “If you aren’t showing up with this, we know someone else is. If you cede that competitive advantage on anything, someone else will fill that breach and take advantage of it.” In 2010 Taylor became director of the National Citizens Coalition, the same organization that was once headed by Stephen Harper. The NCC had come a long way since those bags of mail sent to founder Colin Brown, or even the mass-market billboard campaigns that Harper and Gerry Nicholls managed in the 1990s. With Taylor’s help, the NCC started to pay a lot of attention, just like marketers, to micro-targeting and to custom-designing its product appeal.

But Taylor and other data specialists weren’t holding their breath for the day Canadians would learn what kind of beer or doughnuts that Liberals, Conservatives and New Democrats favoured. Canada’s privacy laws didn’t allow for the sharing of that kind of micro-data and Elections Canada didn’t keep records of how often, or for whom, people voted. Nor did Canadian political parties, under strict campaign spending limits, have the money to pay for the dazzling kind of consumer-data analysis that the Americans could get their hands on. “If I were a political entrepreneur, I think I would be more likely to see a more wide-open and more vibrant market for my wares in the United States than I would in Canada,” Taylor said. Still, though, Canadian political entrepreneurs, especially Conservatives, would keep trying to plunge ever further into this brave new world where consumer and political data merged.

Swimming in the Blue Ocean

In 2005, a few years after he left elected politics, former Reform Party leader Preston Manning set up a think-tank/political training school called the Manning Centre for Building Democracy. Based in Alberta, this centre conducted conferences, seminars and research on how to build the small-c conservative base in Canada. Its stated vision was, “A free and democratic Canada, where conservative principles are well articulated, understood, and implemented.”

In that quest, Manning, the former management consultant, liked to look at ways in which business lessons could be applied to the cause of growing the conservative movement. He became a big fan of a book called
Blue Ocean Strategy
, a manual on how to find new customers in not-so-usual places. The title comes from marine lore and the book, translated into more than forty languages, had become a bit of a bible for marketers. In places where sharks are fierce competitors, the book says, the seas are dyed red with the blood of their battles. But there are quiet areas of the ocean, free of shark fights, where the water is calm and blue. These uncontested fields are where real entrepreneurs can make their mark. Canada’s Cirque du Soleil, unlike any other kind of circus, is a prime example of this attitude toward competition, according to the manual. Rather than compete with the circuses already out in the market, Cirque created a whole different style of three-ring entertainment heavy on acrobatics and free of animals.

Manning urged other Conservatives to read the book and see the political parallels. Not that he thought Canada needed another circus, but he did think Conservatives had to go looking for blue areas free of fighting sharks, and to expand choice rather than intensify competition. Manning’s old US consultant friend Frank Luntz had told the Civitas group in 2006 that “exurbia” held the same potential. Harper’s marketer, Patrick Muttart, had also been intent on creating a political base where no politics had existed, among the Tim Hortons Canadians. To help locate the blue oceans among the electorate, the Manning Centre commissioned a 2012 study with another retail bent. “Reaching Near Customers” it was called, and it was delivered by a demographics whiz named Mitch Wexler.

Wexler unveiled some of his findings at a 2012 Manning Centre conference in Ottawa. Not surprisingly, perhaps, his demographic analysis revealed that Conservatives’ hopes of growth continued to lie among the segments of the population who cared more about their consumer concerns than they did about politics. Wexler calls them “bread-and-butter” Canadians, the same term used long ago when US pollster Lou Harris was trying to tell Liberals where to pitch their political product.

“They don’t identify with any particular party. They work hard, they want to enjoy their family, they want to put food on the table for them, but they don’t want to have to be bothered, or have things get in the way, that have to do with government,” Wexler told the Manning conference.

Wexler himself is an entrepreneur at the leading edge of the merger between consumer and political databases. His company, Politrain Consulting, has developed a whole array of political-marketing software for the modern campaigning professional. One of his systems is called PollMaps.ca, which shows detailed poll-by-poll election results and analyses on colourful maps. Another is Spectrum Electoral Demographics, which adds demographic data to the mix, showing polls in all their sociological splendour—neighbourhoods categorized by average age, household income, family size, ethnicity and so on.

It was Wexler’s demographic analysis that showed Toronto mayoralty candidate Rob Ford where to look for his support in the 2010 election. Ford, though a conservative-style politician, didn’t have access to the CIMS database because he was in a municipal campaign. But he did have Wexler’s array of data to build his electoral crusade against the “gravy train” in Toronto. That was a pitch, Wexler found, that resonated in the ring of suburbs around downtown Toronto, where everyday working men and women were feeling simmering resentment against elites and the establishment in 2010.

Wexler got involved with Conservative politics in 1993 and is proof of the old maxim that your first job in politics will turn out to be your enduring interest. His entree was the federal Progressive Conservative leadership race that gave Canada its first woman prime minister, however briefly. He volunteered to help Kim Campbell’s leadership campaign with something known as “delegate tracking”—keeping an eye on the number of supporters that Campbell was bringing to the convention. After the federal Conservatives’ spectacular loss in the 1993 election, Wexler, like many Conservatives, drifted to provincial politics, working in Mike Harris’s Ontario for cabinet ministers such as Al Palladini and David Johnson. Wexler also did stints in the private sector, always with an eye to software and data.

Around the time the Conservatives came to power in Ottawa, Wexler started to strike out with his own company, confident he had found a smart-market niche for detailed, data-rich political maps. Wexler jokes that his business matches his personal disposition. He calls himself a “completist”: one of those people who starts collecting things and isn’t satisfied until he has the whole set. So once he started gathering up the data for his poll maps, he still thought that he needed more—demographic information, such as the type available to sophisticated private-sector firms. Knowing it would be too costly to accumulate that information himself, he started looking for a business partner. Through a mutual friend, he was introduced to Zhen Mei of Manifold Data Mining Inc., who had just the kind of data that Wexler needed. Within one meeting over coffee, the two men forged a partnership, fusing political and marketplace information.

Zhen grew up in China, but obtained his degree in Germany. During a visit to Canada for a conference in 1996, he and his wife fell in love with Toronto. They were amazed by its diversity; the subway was a marvel to behold. Almost immediately, they decided that Canada would be their future home. So the couple applied to emigrate to Canada and in 1997 settled in a city rich in the kind of demographic data that Zhen was good at accumulating and analyzing. He figured that businesses would pay to understand what kind of customers they needed to attract, and where they needed to be located.

Zhen, much like Patrick Muttart or Martin Goldfarb or the people at Environics Analytics, breaks down the population into consumer types. “Nest builders,” for instance, are “typical, middle, urban Canadians” who spend nearly three times the average amount on home renovation and investments. Here’s what else Manifold Data Mining knows about this group: their average income is $83,900, their house is valued at about $346,300 and there are precisely 2.85 people on average in the home. They are better educated than most, and they work in jobs related to administration, management and the natural and applied sciences. They are more likely to live in Edmonton or Calgary and they trace their ancestry more than average to British, Polish, Dutch and Italian heritage. When they’re not renovating their homes, they play golf and favour reading about business, mystery, sports and gardening. They’re more likely than most Canadians to be buyers of camping equipment and fireplaces.

Zhen purchased his raw data from Statistics Canada, but also from a source rich in consumer-type information—the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement (BBM) surveys. These lengthy questionnaires, called “diaries,” are conducted regularly to provide ratings for TV and radio. But they also gather up all kinds of lifestyle information from participants. BBM doesn’t sell the names, addresses or individual information from its surveys, but it does sell its results, which companies such as Manifold can then sort into postal codes. Zhen also mines data from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, which releases statistics about immigration and settlement patterns. He gathers financial and economic data from the Canadian Bankers Association, real estate market stats from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and surveys from associations in multicultural communities. He puts all these numbers through something he calls a “data-fusion” technique, which matches the patterns in all the numbers to postal codes in Canada.

Mix Manifold’s information with Wexler’s electoral data and what you get are maps that serve as vivid portraits of the consumer-citizen marketplace—a “360-degree view of customers’ needs and desires,” as they bill it. The maps PollMaps provide to candidates are dense, tight, fact-filled portraits of ridings across Canada, loaded with household information sorted by individual polls in the ridings. Basic political information is there: how certain neighbourhoods voted in past elections, or where the pockets of strength and weaknesses are for each party within that riding. Then there’s all the demographic information available from Statistics Canada: average age, income, education, family size and so on within these polls. The most comprehensive of the maps contain consumer and lifestyle information, too.

For Wexler, the real power of all this information lies in its ability to help him create “voter profiles.” These are essentially charts, in which Wexler analyzes voting patterns for each party, based on typical voters from specific constituencies. He can then pick a demographic group—South Asian immigrants, for instance, or single-parent families—and see where parties need to devote extra time or persuasion.

Wexler has also worked as a campaign director for the Conservatives in provincial and federal elections, and he used CIMS and his own maps to organize the vote-getting strategy. CIMS helped him find the names and addresses of past donors and supporters, so that he knew where to dispatch lawn signs and where to hunt for volunteers and donations. His own poll maps helped him figure out how to fine-tune his direct mail to target constituencies and their lifestyles. In the 2011 election, for instance, Wexler knew which neighbourhoods in Brampton would get the Conservative pamphlets about family-friendly policies, and which ones would get the mail written with seniors’ concerns in mind. He knew the pockets of the riding that were more likely to be impressed by a promise to give tax credits for children’s art classes, and which ones would not. In this way, the Conservatives knew where to find the vote-shopping customers for their “boutique” policies—which is why they had those policies in the first place.

Wexler also believes that these sophisticated tools and maps can serve a higher purpose, in improving voter participation. If political parties can identify where turnout has been weak, for instance, they can analyze the data to see what may be keeping people away from the ballot box or, more importantly, what can be done to make those pockets of voters more engaged in the civic life of the country. On Election Day, they can dispatch more volunteers to ferry such people to the polls, for instance. Above and beyond all these arguments for database politics, who could argue with a technological innovation that forces politicians and their strategists to know their voters better? Isn’t that democracy in action?

Taking Names, Making Lists

Not all Conservatives happily went along with their party’s data-collecting frenzy. Inky Mark, who served five terms as a Manitoba MP from 1997 to 2009, regularly bristled at orders from party central to update the database. He told Canadian Press interviewer Jennifer Ditchburn, “I always knew that I had to do my own thing, because… they can control you 100 percent, and that’s exactly what happened with CIMS.”

CIMS first leaped into major public attention late in 2007, after Garth Turner, a member of Parliament for Halton, just outside Toronto, was booted from the Conservative caucus for being a little too open on his much-read blog, the Turner Report. Turner sat for a while as an independent, then joined the opposition Liberal caucus. Once freed from any remaining remnants of Conservative discipline, Turner started documenting the things that had bugged him while he was trying to be a loyal party MP. He was particularly incensed by the order for all Conservative candidates and MPs to log their dealings with voters into the massive, central database called CIMS. But what bothered him even more, he said, was that MPs, in their capacity as elected representatives, were asked to keep filing information into the machine—even if their constituents were dealing with them on a non-partisan basis.