Tomorrow, B.C. voters will be just 300 days from the next provincial election.
In politics, that's an eternity.
So much can change between now and May 9, 2017. On the other hand, the ground work done now will set the stage for the campaign ahead.
During an exclusive 45-minute conversation Monday with The Citizen, it took Horgan less than 300 seconds to start talking about next May and the vote to come.
The NDP held a strategic retreat in Kamloops at the end of last month that included American strategists skilled in the tactical use of metadata and social media to attract both financial and voting support. Yes, these tools are the hallmarks of sophisticated modern campaigns but Horgan pointed to another reason why the NDP has to campaign smart.
"It's cost-effective," he said. "Without a ban on big money, we're going to be outspent four or five times by the Liberals."
Put another way, the B.C. NDP has finally read Moneyball or at least watched the movie. When your competition is vastly outspending you, whether it's baseball or politics, desperation fosters innovation and surprising success. It worked for Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics until most of Major League Baseball adopted, to various degrees, similar statistical analyses to assess players. Sadly for the NDP, using voter databases and other complex mathematical and digital tools is old news. The federal Conservatives under Stephen Harper mastered it first and the other major federal and provincial parties soon followed.
While Horgan enthusiastically spoke about the Kamloops session, particularly how it energized the crowd of mostly under-35 party supporters who attended, he quickly lapsed into portraying B.C. politics through a traditional and instinctual lens, where Kamloops and Prince George are bellwether ridings and how he's feeling an increasingly positive vibe wherever he goes.
That includes a standard election platform that Horgan says will revolve around "the four E's" of environment, economy, education and ethics. Those first three are intellectual matters but ethics is grounded in emotion as much as logic. When I told Horgan about a fellow at the Y Monday morning who said "you tell him that if it's worth fighting for, it's worth fighting dirty," Horgan appreciated the sentiment but also talked about how most MLAs, including himself, are often friendly and willing to collaborate with political opponents behind the scenes but turn on the partisan animosity out in the community. In other words, they treat each other like people in private and like politicians in public.
Horgan is smart to not get too caught up in the newfangled techniques to win elections. As it's always been, voters, like politicians, take their politics personally, often motivated more by fear or anger than by carefully argued policy platforms. The provincial NDP governments in the 1970s and 1990s were the product of voters so mad at Social Credit that they cast aside all worries of an NDP government. Same goes for what happened in Alberta. Seen through that perspective, Justin Trudeau won because people were sick and tired of Stephen Harper.
Horgan prefers looking at this kind of emotional voting through a slightly different (and perhaps less cynical) perspective, where elections boil down to the status quo or change. He knows the Liberals will use the tried and true "don't vote for the NDP, remember the 1990s" argument, not because it's necessarily true but because it works. This won't be Christy Clark or Shirley Bond's first rodeo, either, and they know they're going to hear, as Horgan put it Monday, that "this is a 16-year-old government that is stale and tired."
Horgan is heartened by Trudeau's success last fall, particularly how he countered the stereotype of the "balanced budget fixation" and the Harper labels slapped on him.
That makes sense.
Horgan, like Notley and like Trudeau before him, is the plucky underdog about to lead an enthusiastic team against a richer, more experienced and better organized opponent. He would like to see that new trend continue but that will require overcoming the recent political history of the B.C. NDP and the fear associated with it.
"Those that are angry (at the Liberals) now have been paying attention," Horgan declared.
He plans to spend the next 300 days trying to get more voters to pay attention.
