On the Trail.

Despite the fact that Canadians vote for local MPs, the focus in our elections is overwhelmingly on party leaders

Election campaigns are often not pretty to watch. John Laschinger and Geoffrey Stevens wrote in their book Leaders and Lesser Mortals: "Election campaigns are not designed for establishing the truth or determining the accuracy of perceptions. For a party in opposition, they are a time for driving home allegations and reinforcing negative stereotypes of the party in power."

More and more, campaigns are relying on television advertising, and more and more those ads are turning nasty. The Ontario provincial election of 1999 is a good (or bad, depending on your perspective) example. The Conservatives used attack ads against Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty saying he was simply not up to the job of being premier. The Liberals hit back with ads of Premier Mike Harris making a statement and then using it totally out of context. One reason why political advertising has become negative is because, most of the time, it works. People tend to remember negative messages more than positive ones; they grab the voter's attention.

The general theory is that if politicians can find some enemies, they can be "effectively negative" by being against someone or something - no matter what a politician's faults, she or he may be able to convince voters that the other candidate is even worse. That's what Ottawa-based political consultant Patrick Basham wrote in the Globe and Mail in 1993. But, he said the tactic gets a little trickier in a multi-party system such as ours where voters may send their support elsewhere. They still can work though, as long as the negative attacks are based on documented facts, and the accuser doesn't go overboard and end up damaging his or her own credibility. And, he added, having a third person deliver the negative images through in-the-street interviews is a particularly good way for a politician to benefit from negative messages without being blamed. Of course, candidates can play to their own strengths too.

Lawn signs, buttons, and leaflets are no longer enough to win political campaigns. Politicians have to be adept in front of a camera. They need to be experts at the 10-second sound bite when they're interviewed, and they need to devote a big chunk of their budget to television ads. During the 1988 federal campaign, 30% of campaign spending went to TV advertising. By 1997, this had risen to almost 42% of campaign budgets.

Campaign organizers start working long before the election campaign begins, and in politics today the centrepiece of every campaign is polling. All the major parties do it frequently despite the high cost. A garden-variety, bargain-basement poll costs around $50,000. That buys a 15-minute questionnaire with 1,500 people across the country. During a federal election campaign, major parties will spend between $1 million and $1.5 million each on polling - between 10% and 15% of their total spending. There's a good reason for campaign organizers to spend this much money on polls: it tells them everything they need to know about the voters - what issues are important; what are the party leader's strengths or weaknesses; what are a local candidate's strengths and weaknesses; what are the opposition's strengths and weaknesses. Knowing all this, they then can write the script for their candidate. This script covers what issues a party will stress in its campaign, and what the television commercials will say; it also covers the apparently minor issues of what clothing candidates wear, how they speak at public meetings, whether their spouses and children are part of the campaign, even what food they eat in restaurants. Male candidates are told to steer clear of beards, mustaches, and cigarettes. Female candidates shouldn't pay too much attention to fashion.

It's all very calculated, and party leaders attack and counterattack each other endlessly based on information from pollsters. They continually build images that their opponents attempt to shatter in the hope of at least swaying "swing voters" to their side by election day.

At this stage, it's leadership images that the back-room organizers are concerned with: campaigns, they say, are not good times to try to change people's attitudes toward matters of policy. But, they do offer opportunities to attack the credibility of opponents.

Campaign managers also know that election campaigns are not good times to try to change negative views of their own people. Going back two decades to 1980, Liberal Party election planners knew the public didn't think much of their leader Pierre Trudeau. Their polling told them the public perception of Mr. Trudeau was that he was aloof and arrogant. They didn't try to change those attitudes, they just kept Mr. Trudeau hidden. During one week of the 1980 election campaign, Mr. Tru-deau made just two public appearances; he didn't hold a news conference for 43 days, until the media sent a petition to him begging for one. The Liberals won a majority government by capturing 44% of the popular vote. The pollsters gave the backroom organizers the information they needed to come up with a winning strategy.

U.S. President Bill Clinton's success over incumbent President George Bush was another unexpected victory. Just 21 months before the vote, 88% of the American people were for Mr. Bush. Mr. Clinton's team developed a high technology-based crisis management system. This set-up allows for almost instantaneous responses to any hot issue that comes along. The strategy took Mr. Clinton, a relative unknown, to the President's chair.

The same technique can be used here: party headquarters flashes carefully worded "sound bites" via faxes to each of their candidates. Candidates can be briefed very quickly on any topic. They can go onto a radio phone-in show, for example, and echo what their party leader has said literally minutes before at the other end of the country. They can also launch an attack on an opposition statement within minutes of it being made.

Campaigns and the management of them are becoming faster and faster paced. An internal Conservative Party document recognized this in the early 1990s. "The new reality is that a story lasts one day. If you don't deal with it today, it's not an issue tomorrow. Anyone who followed the [1992] American presidential campaign saw how well the Clinton team dealt with this. Very little went unanswered."

So, the campaign becomes a test of the politicians' skills against each other. In the 1993 federal election it was Liberal Leader Jean Chretien's goal to convince Canadians that the other major parties (Conservatives, New Democrats, Reform, and Bloc Quebecois) were not adequately addressing the issues of jobs and the economy. New Democratic Leader Audrey McLaughlin travelled the country with a mission of putting distance between herself and the "distrusted world of politics in Ottawa," as one report put it. Reform Party leader Preston Manning's goal was to make his party more visible and convince voters that it was a viable alternative. Bloc Quebecois leader Lucien Bouchard aimed to force constitutional and Quebec issues into the foreground in the election. At the same time, Conservative Prime Minister Kim Campbell, who initially was way ahead in the polls, was speaking her mind across the nation a little too candidly: what was seen as political naivete and inexperience ended up costing her her job. At one point Ms. Campbell said what everybody in the election business knew, that campaigns were not a good time to discuss issues. She merely spoke the truth, but she was roasted by opponents and media alike. The Liberals won the election with an overwhelming majority in what analysts called the most stunning federal electoral defeat in Canadian political history.

Now, there is a new kid on the campaigning block; the Internet. Back in June 1999, during the Ontario election campaign, there were signs that the Web eventually will change the political process, just as radio and television did in their early days. The Internet could bring politicians and their constituents closer together by providing easier ways to communicate directly. It could re-establish contact in a world where many feel politicians have lost touch with the rest of us. It's still in its infancy, but one research executive described the Internet as "a political weapon of the future." In the Ontario election it was used primarily by political parties as an internal communications tool rather than as a mass-market medium. All three of Ontario's major political parties have internal Web sites where candidates and campaign workers can access information about strategic issues, new policies, and the movement of their leaders in the province. E-mail replaced faxes as a way to share information and answer media questions instantly. In the future, it could give voters more valuable information on policies instead of the inflammatory political rhetoric of the past. The next step will be setting up sites where voters can question political parties and receive quick replies, and chat rooms where people can exchange ideas. Inevitably, the Internet will also be the next political battlefield with parties setting up sites to attack each other.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. Liberal leaders Louis St. Laurent, Lester Pearson, and John Turner all lost elections they had called when they were leading in the polls. The same thing happened to Progressive Conservative prime minister Kim Campbell. Research their campaigns and report on the events leading up to their defeats.

2. Discuss the role that leadership debates play in election campaigning.

3. In April 2000, the B.C. Supreme Court heard allegations that former premier Glen Clark ordered figures to be manipulated in the NDP's so-called fudge-it budgets of 1995-96 and 1996-97. Find out more details on these charges of electoral fraud against the New Democratic Party over the controversial budgets. There were shenanigans in Manitoba too in 1995 when some Conservatives tried to subvert the election process by paying some people to run as independents in order to draw votes away from the NDP. Find out how this story ended as well.

JUST A SAMPLE

Opinion polling is based on the assumption that a purely random sample of, say, 1,000 or 1,500 people, if it's done right, can mirror the thinking of a larger group. But to be reliable, that sample has to match roughly the demographic shape of the nation: so many women, so many people under 50, so many in a certain income bracket.

With a non-response or refusal rate to their calls as high as 60% in the 1990s - about double what it was a decade earlier - pollsters sometimes have to take what they can get. It may take 3,000 or more calls to arrive at a 1,000- person sample, for example. And, if the end result is an unrepresentative grouping, the conclusions may be inaccurate. But pollsters include their estimated margin of error. If, for example, the poll has a margin of error of 3.1%, 19 times out of 20, it means if you surveyed all eligible voters, you could expect the results to be 3.1% higher or lower than the poll results, 95% of the time. The smaller the sample, the greater the margin of error.

Even the best run polls can run into problems, in terms of being a true reflection of the voting public. Designing the survey is an art in itself: how a question is phrased will affect how people answer. Poorly phrased questions can lead to inaccuracy, which can be politically disastrous. And, people can change their minds between the poll and voting day. As one researcher for Gallup Canada in Toronto said: "In politics, a day can be a century. Whenever you look at a poll result, realize that it's a snapshot."

So, being ahead in the polls, doesn't mean you'll come out the winner. Many confident prime ministers launched "safe" elections based on favourable opinion polls. But according to one report, almost every front-runner since 1957 who has called an election has lost ground during the campaign, ending up on election day with less support than was indicated in the pre-election polls. And, several were defeated.

WHERE THE ACTION IS

The best polling technology and image makers in the world can't win an election campaign if a party doesn't have the workers on the ground. The election organization starts at party headquarters. From here a relatively small number of paid workers control the national campaign. The national campaign director, who works closely with the party leader, co-ordinates such things as the polling and advertising strategy. Regional or provincial campaign managers report to and take orders from the national director. Further down the ladder, other paid workers handle the day-to-day details of organizing the leader's tour, working with printers to get brochures produced, or acting as liaison with the media.

At the constituency level, nearly all campaign workers are volunteers. Each candidate will have a campaign manager. This person is often a business executive who takes a leave of absence from his or her job to run the campaign. And then, there are the tens of thousands of people who give up their spare time to help a candidate they believe in. They stuff envelopes, put up lawn signs, go door-to-door trying to persuade voters to choose their candidate, staff campaign headquarters, and do scores of other jobs.

These are the people who learn vital information about voters. Working the phone banks, volunteers call people and try to find out voter intentions. Known supporters are set aside; they'll be called on voting day to make sure they've cast a ballot or to find out if they need a lift to the polls. Non-supporters are also set aside; there's not enough time to change a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative into a New Democrat during a campaign. The phone workers are looking for what the election business calls "persuadables." They're the undecided voters, and they'll receive at least seven party contacts by mail, phone, and on the doorstep.

FACT FILE

The average length of a television clip during the 1997 Canadian federal election was 8.2 seconds on CBC and 7.1 seconds on CTV, according to a survey conducted by the Fraser Institute's National Media Archive.

FACT FILE

There's a 74% overall voter turnout at Canadian federal elections; a 50% to 60% turnout for voters between the ages of 18 and 25.

FACT FILE

Politicians may not be able to tell lies anymore; in March 2000, a B.C. judge overturned a 1999 mayoralty election because the winner distributed information about an opponent knowing it to be untrue.

Websites

Liberal Party http://www.liberal.ca

Canadian Alliance http://www.canadianalliance. ca/index_e.cfm#Top

Bloc Quebecois - http://www. blocquebecois.parl.gc.ca

New Democratic Party http://www.ndp.ca

Progressive Conservative Party http://www.pcparty.ca