The Brand Matters

People must choose parties the same way they choose what kind of car to buy.

To no one's surprise, I'm sure, the NDP easily won two byelections tonight. In Elmwood, former NDP MP Bill Blaikie made the jump to provincial politics, garnering just over half (53.6%) of the vote. Up in The Pas, the NDP's Frank Whitehead trounced the opposition by winning over an incredible 74.6% of those who voted. Unfortunately, people in both constituency did not do that in great numbers today (37% in Elmwood and 31% in The Pas respectively).

As far as yesterday's predictions went, I won't be forced to eat crow, at the very least. Bill Blaikie topped 50 percent of the vote and I was close in guessing the turnout in both races. The only thing I expected was for the Tories to do somewhat better in The Pas - my 45 to 50 percent threshold was lowballing it, to say the least.

More importantly - and that's the whole point of this post, I guess - is that I wasn't prepared to make the kinds of guesses that some local bloggers, blogophiles (see the comments) and semi-professional entertainers who believe their own B.S. about serving the public interest were making about voters in Elmwood being turned off by Bill Blaikie's alleged "double-dipping" and/or voting en masse for local Liberal hopeful Regan Wolfrom. As it was, Wolfrom finished a very distant third. I guess you can say I learned my lesson after foolishly pumping up strong Liberal candidates running in safe NDP seats in the last election.

The bottom line - and let this be a lesson to pundits and prognosticators (including myself) who are being spun more and more by what they read on the Internet - is that the brand matters. When a lot of people buy a car or truck, they buy it because they're Ford people, or Chevy people, or (increasingly) Toyota or Honda people. When they buy a vehicle, they tend to be repeat customers of the same company, or even the same model. The same is true of voting: in Manitoba, people in northeast Winnipeg or the North vote orange, and have done so for a long time, just as folks in the rural south or Tuxedo have an ongoing habit of taking the Progressive Conservatives for repeated test drives. These days, more Manitobans - especially in the cities - have developed a brand loyalty to the orange model and its chief pitchman, Gary Doer, to Hugh McFadyen's blue model, while the red model or the green model are barely on the radar.

If people know what kind of car they want to buy before they step on the lot, they're not likely to be swayed into buying a model they've never heard of - no matter how much the salesperson leans on them. Regan Wolfrom probably sold the Liberal brand pretty hard in Elmwood, but he's like the guy at the GM lot trying to sell a longtime truck buyer an Opel - no one here knows what it is or what it's about, and they're not prepared to take a chance on it. Just give them something with a Chevy logo on it, thanks.

True, there are some folks who might not be as set on a particular model or type of vehicle. Those people are like swing voters. When it comes to cars, I count myself among those people. That's why I bought a Saturn when I bought my last car. After paying yet another repair bill today, I don't know what kind of car I'll buy next time - but I sure as hell know it won't be a Saturn. To take this analogy back over to voting, I'm like that person who voted NDP in Ontario in 1990 because I wasn't sold by any of the other offers, and five years later I ended up voting for Mike Harris' Tories. While there are examples like these in the political world where the swing voter will go all over the place, by and large the patterns are set and don't change much.

It pains me to say this because deep down I'd like to believe people vote for individual candidates and not for party labels - or increasingly, party brands that rely heavily on a leader's personal appeal - but the local candidate ranks far down the list when people are considering who to cast a ballot for. Rarely, an individual candidate can be the difference, but those instances are not only rare, but tend to be marked by razor-thin margins of victory (think Rick Borotsik riding his personal popularity to a less-than-convincing 56-vote win over the NDP's Scott Smith in Brandon West two years ago).

On a final note, Dan Lett made a very good point in his column today and it deserves to be recognized. People are far too cynical about the motives of a public servant like Bill Blaikie. Yes, he will make a lot more money than Joe and Jane Frontporch in Elmwood might make in a year, but he earned it by serving in the House of Commons for almost 30 years and he'll earn it again in spades if he enters the NDP cabinet. Elected politics - the business of serving Mr. and Mrs. Frontporch - is actually very hard work. There are many, many people in the private sector who make much more money than any MP or provincial cabinet ministers while putting in far fewer hours, getting to spend much more time with their families and generally enjoying the luxury of not having bloggers and media types publicly calling them incompetent, lazy, corrupt or stupid every other day.

I, for one, congratulate people willing to step into the public arena and serve - which is exactly what Mr. Blaikie and Mr. Whitehead will do tomorrow when they show up for budget day.

Ps. Nice catch, "Brian." That was a rather weak attempt at spin.