OTTAWA—Uniting a fragmented country is Justin Trudeau’s chief job as he steps into his second mandate.

How Trudeau got that national job — on the strength of 157 small, local victories — is an important story as this Liberal prime minister tries to de-fragment the nation.

Governing is an art. Getting elected, in the 21st century, is increasingly a science. The question is: can Trudeau put the art and science together?

The federal Liberals are in power as 2019 comes to an end thanks to what may have been one of the most sophisticated, locally targeted election campaigns this country has ever seen.

“Justin Trudeau didn’t win the election. Justin Trudeau’s campaign organization won the election,” says Nik Nanos, one of Canada’s leading pollsters, who has been sifting through the results of the 2019 election and marvelling at how Liberals gathered up a national mandate with a precise focus on specific pockets of the country.

Nanos believes that this national-versus-local focus raises important questions about how a Liberal minority government will patch together a pan-Canadian vision for governing. He also believes that Liberals’ growing mastery of micro-targeted campaigning will make them unafraid to plunge into another election if their new minority government collapses.

To understand how Trudeau will set about uniting the country, though, you first need to know how he and his Liberal team divided it up to win. Here is that story.

The man in charge of the Liberal campaign organization was Jeremy Broadhurst, a veteran of the party through good times and bad over the past couple of decades. If one accepts Nanos’s analysis of who won this election, Broadhurst is due some credit, but he modestly throws that in the direction of the troops on the ground.

“In a campaign that saw an unprecedented amount of money spent in incredibly innovative ways in the digital sphere, the biggest single difference for us was a very old-school concept — our ability to mobilize and deliver our vote in the tight ridings on election day,” Broadhurst says.

For all the Liberals’ love of science and digital campaigning, Broadhurst and others worked on the principle that the most valuable election tool is good old-fashioned door-knocking and conversations in person with voters. A state-of-the-art, 21st-century campaign, on this score, is not much different from campaigns of previous centuries.

In Campaign 2019 for the Liberals, this was a mass effort, tested, fine-tuned and logged to pinpoint accuracy by the analytics squad.

Collectively, around 90,000 volunteers knocked on doors and made phone calls before and during the campaign: 21 million “attempts,” as they’re termed, and 14 million of those were during the official campaign from Sept. 11 to Oct. 21. That’s two million more than those made by Liberal volunteers during the official 2015 campaign — which was nearly twice as long as this year’s.

Advertising is another powerful way for politicians to talk to voters during campaigns. But if the Liberals’ big red machine of 2019 is any indication, even this effort is becoming less national, and far more local, targeted and precise. Some of the most successful ads the Liberals launched in 2019 were run only in selected markets, and some of them never hit the mass, television airwaves.

One such ad featured former Toronto police chief Bill Blair — newly named as minister of public safety and emergency preparedness this week — talking about how the Liberals would be cracking down on gun crime. It first aired on radio, mainly in the 905 area code outside Toronto, and then was targeted digitally to the same audience on social media.

Another ad in this vein featured Chrystia Freeland, who is now Trudeau’s deputy prime minister and minister of intergovernmental affairs, talking about how the Liberals had fought “tooth and nail” with U.S. President Donald Trump on free trade. Yet another starred MP Lawrence MacAulay, reappointed as veterans affairs minister, talking about seniors issues.

All the Liberals’ meticulous tracking showed that these ads were hugely helpful to the 157 seats they won on Oct. 21. Liberal insiders are saying that revealing the number of clicks and views would reveal too much to their competitors.

What’s interesting, though, is that not all Canadians saw these ads — Liberals blasted them to certain people, either in demographic or geographic pockets; the kind of people who needed to hear messages about Canada-U.S. relations, guns or seniors’ concerns. Notably, as well, these ads all included people other than Trudeau, who was not the big digital draw in 2019 that he was in 2015.

Even with their negative advertising — and yes, they did launch some — Liberals picked and chose their target audiences. If you lived in Ontario, you might have seen or heard a digital ad warning that Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer would be just like Premier Doug Ford. Outside Ontario, you might have seen Scheer being compared to former prime minister Stephen Harper.

If you lived in downtown Toronto, in the land of safe Liberal ridings, you might not have seen any negative advertising at all — in a digital age, parties can tailor their attacks to reach only those whose vote might be influenced by the warning.

In 2015, according to Broadhurst, the Liberals put about three-quarters of their advertising budget into big, national ads, mainly on TV. The rest was spent on digital ads — on Facebook or Twitter, for instance, where ads can be personalized and targeted to select audiences.

In 2019, the ratio of traditional to digital ads was more like 60/40, Broadhurst says, and the day may soon come when that’s more like 50/50 — or even a bigger proportion for the more nimble and inexpensive digital ads.

Dan Arnold is the head of research for the Liberals, who got up every morning at 4 to put together the data to inform the daily campaign. He was drawing on reams of information: nightly polling (800 interviews a night); focus groups (about 40 conducted all over Canada through the campaign); reports from the field; as well as a huge swath of digital data, including responses to online surveys, and even Google search trends.

Arnold and his team had a view of this campaign that would be the envy of journalists, especially the national media, who tend to focus more on the so-called “air war” — the big themes and small scuffles that eat up the daily headlines and fuel the horse-race polls.

But the view from the ground can be a reality check to the air-war preoccupations. Case in point: the explosive news, early in the campaign, that Trudeau had a history of dressing up in blackface and brownface.

In the air war, this was nothing less than a bombshell. But by coincidence, the Liberals had focus groups meeting in the immediate aftermath — two sessions around North York in the GTA.

To some people’s surprise, and Liberals’ relief, the focus group participants — even those from visible minorities — weren’t all that fussed. They had seen the apology, believed Trudeau was sincere, not a racist, and many said it was time to move on.

“This is why it’s good to have focus groups,” Arnold says, “because it shows you how people actually feel, when you see their tone and facial expressions as they talk about an issue.”

Arnold’s research files, bolstered by detailed reports from the analytics team, would help the Liberal strategists decide where to place those nimble digital ads, where to dispatch extra volunteers or where to take Trudeau’s national campaign tour on a day-to-day basis. The Liberal leader spent far more time than planned in the 905 area in the final days of the campaign, for instance, as they saw more and more ridings in play.

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Two of the leading people in the Liberals’ data game are Tom Pitfield, a childhood friend of Trudeau’s, and Sean Wiltshire, senior vice-president of Data Sciences Inc., a firm that Pitfield founded, which also does campaign analytics for political parties in a number of other countries. During this past election, Wiltshire served as the Liberals’ chief of analytics, sharing an office at headquarters with Arnold.

Pitfield and Wiltshire’s science was crucial to the 2015 campaign — many said afterward that the digital campaign helped seal the majority victory.

But Pitfield, looking at both campaigns now, says he is more proud of his team’s 2019 effort. Essentially, as he explains, it boils down to the difference between amplification and sophistication. In 2015, the digital team’s work was all about pushing a popular Trudeau to the widest audience possible. In 2019, the digital team’s far more complicated job was to pinpoint the places and the people who would help build a Liberal victory in pockets all over the country.

“I am proud of what my team accomplished,” Pitfield says. “It was always going to be a challenge to win again online under such different circumstances.”

Wiltshire explains: “We were very, very location-targeted this time. Last time we were macro-regional targeted; this time it was all riding-based.”

The Liberal machine breaks down Canada’s 338 ridings into six groups, ranked on winnability. Diamond ridings are rock-solid safe Liberal ridings; then there’s platinum, gold, silver, bronze, steel, and finally, wood. (We can safely assume, given the election results, that there was lots of wood out west.) Each rank contained roughly 50 or 60 ridings.

“In the six, eight, nine months before the election, we were playing with a larger map, going after all the gold, silver and bronze,” Arnold says. “Then, as you get into the campaign, it starts to narrow to the golds and the silvers. Then over the last couple of days or last week of the campaign, it narrowed further.”

The alchemy of this ranking system is based on loads of data, gathered up by the Liberal forces on the ground. Ridings move around in the rankings too. The Milton riding, just west of Toronto, is a good example. Once upon a time, Milton would have fallen into the steel category, home to the Conservatives’ popular deputy leader, Lisa Raitt.

But Liberal candidate Adam van Koeverden, an Olympic kayaker who knows a thing or two about golds, silvers and bronzes, pushed Milton higher up the ranks all summer and fall, yielding a surprise steal from the Conservatives on Oct. 21.

Each riding was also assigned a number by the Liberal analytics team. It was a target — the precise number of identified Liberal voters needed to win the riding. In the campaign office of Nathaniel Erskine-Smith in Beaches—East York, the number was prominently displayed in red on one of the posters: 13,591.

Not 13,500 or 14,000 — 13,591. The Liberals’ analytics team came up with this figure based on past results, expected turnout and how the vote tends to split in Beaches—East York. Before and during the campaign, volunteers for Erskine-Smith embarked on door-knocking with this number at the front of mind.

At each door, campaign workers, toting iPads and phones loaded with an app called “MiniVan,” would log responses at each door. Any voter who accepted a sign or indicated that they were voting Liberal would be one more toward that 13,591 target, tracked by the local campaign office, but also by the analytics team in Ottawa, keeping a constant eye trained on the ground game.

Make no mistake: all that door-knocking is treated as a real science. Over the course of one successful election campaign in 2015 and 18 byelections since, the Liberal machine has been constantly updated with road-tested intelligence: the best time to find residents home, the best streets to display campaign ads, what doorsteps to ignore, and so on.

Individual voters are ranked too, on a one-to-10 system in the database: a voter who is a one will never vote Liberal; a 10 is a die-hard loyalist. Liberals don’t say exactly how they’ve amassed the data to make this ranking — yet another trade secret — only that it comes from feedback or information that voters have supplied willingly and often publicly. No consumer data, such as what cars you buy or magazine-subscription lists, has been gathered, Broadhurst says flatly.

The most important factors in the individual voter rankings, says Arnold, are likelihood to vote Liberal and likelihood to cast a ballot. Knowing where a voter sits on these scales helps the campaign workers focus on whether this voter needs persuasion or simply a nudge to the ballot box.

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This data-rich political machine is light years ahead of where the Liberals were a decade ago. Back in the aftermath of the devastating 2011 election, which reduced the party to third place, I recall watching Liberal campaign officials at a convention session, trying to persuade partisans that they had to up their game on data science. There were lots of shaking heads in the crowd; it all seemed a little too mechanical for Liberals who liked to think of politics as more art than science.

Not anymore. “This campaign, even more than 2015, was a validation of the decade since 2011, the transformation of this party,” Broadhurst says of the Liberals’ new mastery of the ground game.

“It was there in 2015 but it was hard to notice it because of the wave that came at the end. This election was the payoff for all that hard work. There was no wave. We won it in the trenches. “

Pitfield was the chief digital strategist for the Liberals’ campaign. Wiltshire oversaw all the analytics that Liberals, even senior ones, had once doubted as useful campaign tools.

“One of the biggest differences today from 2015 is that we were at a point where people trusted data more,” Arnold says.

But the data itself is also light years ahead of where the party was even four years ago. Pitfield and Wiltshire are particularly proud of the advances they have made in what’s called “resonance testing.” In plain English, Wiltshire says, this means a much more sophisticated, scientific way of testing public reaction to ads and other Liberal campaign material. Essentially, it means developing ways to weed out factors that may interfere with true and useful feedback from the public.

“We weren’t just running the same (2015) play over again,” Wiltshire says. “We had refined our craft.”

Heading into the weekend before the Oct. 21 election, the Liberal team was pretty sure that they were in striking distance of 160 seats, give or take a few. They won 157. A campaign waged with laser-focused attention to the ground war had handed the Liberals re-election.

What Trudeau does with this win — how he makes a big, national-unity picture out of the micro-targeted science of dividing the country into winnable pockets — will be one of the biggest tests of his newly re-elected government.

Susan Delacourt is the Star’s Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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