(Photo credit: https://ontariopc.ca/)
In politics, people like change. After two consecutive terms in government, it should have been an uphill climb to win a third for Premier Doug Ford. But it wasn’t. Last week, he won—again—and with a majority of seats at Queen’s Park; and with that win, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario made history. The party has been in power since 2018. Regardless of political leanings, one cannot ignore that center-right parties are winning and doing something right in North America. Or perhaps their opponents are doing something wrong. My thought is that it’s both.
Coming off the heels of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US election, this latest conservative win is another blow to the progressive movement. It should provoke a moment of deep reflection leading to a change in strategy, and as part of that, a questioning of the communications and public relations approaches that have—as evidenced by election results—been ineffective at winning the hearts and minds of the public. A change in strategy is desperately needed.
PR missteps and a new path forward
Public Safety. As I wrote in a previous post, public safety is universally popular across the political spectrum, but only the center and center-right talk openly about it; and in so doing, they’ve claimed the issue as their own which has won them support from conservatives and moderate liberals alike. As rational animals we’re hard-wired to care about safety both for ourselves and our immediate families. Progressives have missed an opportunity by allowing their political opponents to brand them as ‘soft of crime’ by not taking a more definitive stance on violent public disorder. In the process, they’ve lost a significant amount of support from moderate liberals who would otherwise be inclined to support them. These are small business owners, young entrepreneurs, and families who espouse socially progressive values but are fiscally moderate and want safety for themselves, their families, and their employees. Thankfully, this message is breaking through and a new generation of progressives like Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco’s re-elected district attorney, and Daniel Lurie, the city’s new mayor are making public safety the centerpiece of their administrations.
People remember stories, not data. And the power of stories of real people in the news victimized by violence will resonate longer and louder than statistics of crime declining or an appeal for more services as an upstream preventative intervention. The latter (data on declining crime rates and appeals for services) are what progressives often use to respond to the former (actual stories involving humans victimized by crime)—and that has proven ineffective at persuading the public and winning support. Progressives must reclaim public safety as a core value and unapologetically champion justice reforms and punishment for violent crime, while also supporting services and programs that prevent criminal behavior in the first place. It is possible to do both—and in fact, you must.
Disavow professional activists. Professional activists are such a small wedge of society and yet their views—which are alien to so many—have enjoyed a disproportionate amount of attention and support within groups of otherwise rational, well-meaning people. Examples include abolishing police and prisons and legalizing hard drugs. These views will instantly kill credibility and are intuitively bad ideas that undercut the electoral hopes of any politician tethered to them. Progressives have eroded much of their own support by being associating with professional activists and their views because their extremeness has driven away would-be supporters into the waiting arms of other political parties.
Evidence of this can be seen in the string of political defeats for progressives in Canada: Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), Ontario, and likely across Canada in the Spring with the upcoming federal election. Even though the NDP still barely formed government in BC, the Conservatives there—considered a fringe party before this past election—became the official opposition and won a record number of seats.
Professional activists are routinely the loudest in the room—including on social media—but as evidenced by election results time and time again, their voices are not representative. It’s important to remember this and assign a level of seriousness and attention to their views that is proportional to the support they enjoy in broader society—which isn’t a lot.
Avoid their consultants. A cottage industry made up of progressive campaigners and communications consultants exists offering training to progressive organizations looking to enhance capacity and skills. They gather and train every year at places like Hollyhock on Cortes Island, typically every summer. I’ve attended many of their retreats and over the years gradually grew skeptical of the value of their insight after observing a string of losses from the very organizations and communities they trained. To put it bluntly: You want to learn how to win from someone who has a track record of winning. And many of them do not. As Hugo Mercier explains in Not Born Yesterday, from an evolutionary standpoint, what makes past performance a good credibility cue is that it is hard to fake.
As an attendee—and someone focused on outcomes—I saw how their guidance and strategy had more to do with instilling and upholding a progressive orthodoxy, making people feel good about the work they were doing, and building solidarity and connection across movements rather than actual outcomes. In fact, it was precisely the most effective tactics, such as appealing to an audience’s values rather than one’s own and shifting messaging to become more palatable to a wider demographic, that these consultants seemed to eschew. They regarded compromise as selling out or stigmatizing (rather than strategic); and it seemed more important to pass the progressive purity test and subscribe to the ways of thinking and viewpoints that have failed in the past to build broad-based support.
Hollyhock on Cortes Island, British Columbia, 2018
I believe it’s better to learn to win from winners. Oftentimes, these are consultants and firms that have no political affiliation and come from the private sector, which puts greater emphasis on outcomes and deliverables—as opposed to making people feel good—and anyone willing to pay for service is a client. I would rather learn from someone with a track record of winning campaigns—even if I may disagree with their political views—and win elections than feel good but lose them. Victory after all is the ultimate ‘good’ feeling.
Focus on jobs, economy, and innovation. It’s universally true that people like nice things. And to attain those, an economy must be thriving with plentiful jobs fueled by innovation and growth. Economic stability is consistently ranked as one of the top issues for voters and the political party that best exemplifies this spirit will win. But too often, the public sees progressives as lukewarm advocates of the economy and business who favor instead social issues. These are also important but will often take a back seat for voters when they can’t put food on their tables and pay rent. As we’ve seen through countless elections, and as presented in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, people first care about safety and security (including economic security) before turning their attention to higher order concerns like justice and equity. I wish that were not the case, but it’s the reality we face—one that is hard-wired into the human brain—and we must learn to work within it.
Suffice it to say, the next four years will be difficult. But hopefully the real-world fallout of having conservative administrations in power will push the global progressive movement where it needs to go to regain its spot at the political table: the center/center-left. We need to organize, strategize, and campaign in the world that is—with its messy realities—not in the world we want.
Gain power and win elections first. If you can’t do that, little else matters.