OTTAWA—There are similarities between the state of the Liberal Party of Canada today and that of the U.S. Democratic Party in the aftermath of the re-election of Republican President George W. Bush in November 2004 with a stunning 12 million more votes than he had garnered four years prior.
“In February of 2005, as we were getting ready to take over the DNC (Democratic National Chair), the headlines were: ‘The Democratic Party is the party of irrelevancy, is an incredibly shrinking party’—similar headlines I’m sure you guys have heard for a while now,” Tom McMahon, executive director of the DNC from 2005 to 2009, said at the Liberal Party’s biennial convention on Saturday.
“Anyone in this room has been around politics long enough to know that if you’re able to attract more voters than last time and people are unhappy with you, clearly you have an incredible infrastructure.”
McMahon explained how from then on, the DNC developed a strategy to engage with Americans on a consistent basis rather than only once every four years.
“If the other side has done a smear campaign non-stop for three years, you can’t come back from there,” he said.
Much of the reform of the DNC happened through professionalization of the party—consolidating its voter and member databases into one centralized computer system shared by all party branches throughout the country instead of individual states using distinct technologies.
Similar plans have been under discussion at the Liberal Biennial Convention held in Ottawa from Jan. 13 to 15, as the Liberals seek to breathe new life into the party and catch up to the advances of the Conservatives.
Storytelling, Engagement
McMahon addressed a crowd of hundreds of Liberal Party members eager to draw from American experience and tactics to modernize and improve the operations of their party in the hope of ousting the Conservatives in the next election, which should take place in 2015.
The DNC’s steep improvements in operations were matched by adapting the delivery of its message to voters.
Discussing this topic at the convention was Rich Mintz, vice president of strategy for Blue State Media, the company that provided technology and ideas to allow the DNC to become a political powerhouse online.
“Storytelling is very important. You need to make people feel like they are a part of something that has a storyline and that they are a part of,” said Mintz.
The strategy was highly effective. The Obama campaign in the 2008 elections collected two million donors, many of them small-sum donors, and raised US$550 million.
The campaign team sent off two billion e-mails in a span of 18 months. Those numbers appear even more impressive as the 2012 presidential campaign begins to take shape.
“The people here [in this room] are used to [active political engagement] because you’re the top most active at the top of the pyramid, but part of our job is to inspire people to feel engaged at their own natural levels,” Mintz said.
This not only involved writing e-mails in certain ways and in certain volumes; on the ground, the DNC changed its canvassing strategy by building a neighbour-to-neighbour program in which volunteers would work in their own areas.
“You know the people you’re talking to; they know you. They’re much more likely to open the door if you come to their door than if I come to their door,” McMahon said.
As much as possible, the DNC tried to match demographics as well, so that women would make phone calls to women, Latinos to Latinos, and so on.
