At The Senator THE PUNDITS PONDER
The Federal Election - What Did We Learn?
Rob Silver is a Partner at Crestview. He was recently named as one of 2010’s international political “rising stars” by Campaigns and Elections magazine. He was the only Canadian who received the honour last year.
Mark Spiro is a Principal at Crestview Public Affairs and a veteran of international and domestic political campaigns at the municipal, provincial and federal levels.
Chad Rogers is a public affairs consultant specializing in public opinion research, communications and strategy at Crestview Public Affairs. He is a reformed political staffer and campaign activist at home and abroad.
Our At the Senator political experts spent their most recent pondering session reflecting on the 2011 federal election and some of the lessons learned.
Chad Rogers: So we find ourselves at Toronto’s oldest eatery, once again at The Senator with Rob Silver and Mark Spiro. We’ve just been through a pretty exciting federal election cycle. May 2nd gave Canadians their first majority gov- ernment in how many years?
Rob Silver: Since the 2000 election.
CR: The first majority government in over a decade. We thought it would be good, over lunch today, to try and figure out what the big lessons were from this campaign. A lot of people thought they knew what this election was about go- ing in and knew for certain what the outcome would be. There were some shocked people on May 2nd. Let’s go with the holy trinity of campaign ideas, what are the three big lessons we learned. Rob?
RS: The first thing is that you need to “define yourself ”. Long-term, branding is very important in terms of being able to connect with voters, in terms of be- ing able to draw out voters, in terms of building your voter coalition. Two par- ties did a very good job defining them-
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selves and one party obviously did not, the Liberals.
CR: Mark, what do you think?
Mark Spiro: Yes, I think definition is ob- viously important.
CR: How do you think you “define yourself” successfully, not forgetting this campaign, and what are the key ele- ments that go into “defining yourself” successfully in the context to an elec- tion campaign?
MS: Start early, be repetitive, repetitive, repetitive, repetitive…and you can’t be distant from your brand. There are cer- tain hard-wired perspectives that people have on political parties, which have been built up over 140 years in some cases. You have to be connected to your brand and therefore connected to your base. If you’re not connected to your brand, if you’re not connected to your base, things go sideways very, very quickly.
CR: If I could extend that, it’s also that you have to be the absolute Leader of your Party.
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