{"id":861,"date":"2015-10-15T12:40:20","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T16:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/?p=861"},"modified":"2015-10-15T12:44:24","modified_gmt":"2015-10-15T16:44:24","slug":"why-is-harper-bringing-out-the-ford-brothers-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/why-is-harper-bringing-out-the-ford-brothers-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Is Harper Bringing Out The Ford Brothers Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Harper has started doing campaign appearances<\/a> with Rob and Doug Ford.\u00a0 A lot of people find this confusing, given how divisive the Fords are.\u00a0 It seems especially confusing in light of the Conservatives’ drug messaging: they’ve taken out ads<\/a> claiming (falsely) that Justin Trudeau wants to make marijuana more accessible to children, while Rob Ford has admitted<\/a> to smoking crack cocaine in the recent past.\u00a0 This strikes people as hypocritical and confused messaging.\u00a0 But I don’t think it’s too difficult to see how it might actually make sense.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem is that people mistakenly view voters as making rational, informed decisions about who to vote for on the basis of policy decisions.\u00a0 But politics are considerably more tribal than rational.\u00a0 To be clear, I don’t mean “people I disagree with are irrational”; it’s true across the political spectrum.\u00a0 Voters identify with specific parties or movements in such a way that things are considered right or wrong by virtue of who they’re associated with.\u00a0 One obvious example: many Democrats who vehemently opposed NSA wire-tapping under George W. Bush have become loud defenders of NSA wire-tapping under Barack Obama.\u00a0 Same with drone strikes, and so forth.\u00a0 It’s important to remember that, for many voters, Rob Ford is part of their tribe<\/em> and so his specific actions are less important than his tribal affiliation.<\/p>\n

The tribal nature of politics helps get to my theory on why the Conservatives are bringing the Fords out to campaign for them.\u00a0 We’re now just four days away from election night.\u00a0 At this point, there probably isn’t going to be a lot of shift in who voters support.\u00a0 Policies have been explained, slogans have been repeated, ad campaigns have been purchased.\u00a0 But what might matter is something known as “Get Out The Vote<\/a>” (GOTV).\u00a0 GOTV is the processes by which, on election day, parties try to get the people they’ve identified as their supporters to the polls to actually cast ballots.<\/p>\n

I’m highly skeptical of the value of GOTV.\u00a0 I think politicians and pundits both dramatically over-state the value of the “ground game”.\u00a0 For example, many people argued that it didn’t matter if the NDP was leading in the polls in Quebec in 2011 because they didn’t have staff or volunteers on the ground in Quebec, and thus couldn’t turn their theoretical support into actual votes.\u00a0 Obviously the NDP won an enormous electoral victory in QC with no ground game.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the importance of GOTV is something that political parties deeply believe in.<\/p>\n

At this point most people seem to believe that the election is going to be a relatively close one between the Conservatives and the Liberals (I’ve stated my own deep skepticism<\/a> of electoral projections in Canada).\u00a0 In a close election, political parties become more convinced than ever of the importance of GOTV and the ground game.\u00a0 In particular, the Conservatives likely fear that the Liberals are poised to take seats in the GTA’s suburbs, which have been a Conservative stronghold in recent years, and where the Fords have typically found considerable support.\u00a0 The reasoning behind bringing the Fords out is not that Harper believes they’re going to attract new voters, but that they need to get their base in the GTA out on election day in order to hold on to seats that have been an important part of the Conservatives’ electoral base for much of Stephen Harper’s time as CPC leader.\u00a0 They likely fear that if they lose the GTA suburbs, they will lose the election.\u00a0 So teaming up with the Fords is a perfectly rational response.<\/p>\n

The plan may not work (or I may be wrong about what the plan actually is).\u00a0 But if you think about a federal parliamentary campaign as a bunch of small elections rather than as one big one, it’s not too difficult to see why Harper might be teaming up with such a potentially toxic family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen Harper has started doing campaign appearances with Rob and Doug Ford.\u00a0 A lot of people find this confusing, given how divisive the Fords are.\u00a0 It seems especially confusing in light of the Conservatives’ drug messaging: they’ve taken out ads claiming (falsely) that Justin Trudeau wants to make marijuana more accessible to children, while Rob […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=861"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":863,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions\/863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/greatapes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}