OTTAWA — Hot on the heels of President Barack Obama’s re-election victory, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal leadership team is looking to U.S. Democrats for advice on how to win.

Mitch Stewart, who was the battleground-states director for the Obama campaign, has been sought out to speak to Trudeau’s strategists on Thursday, according to officials with the Trudeau campaign.

Trudeau’s leadership bid is being organized around much of the same strategic goals that drove Obama’s victories in 2008 and this year — rallying support from young people and other progressive-leaning voters who haven’t traditionally cast ballots in elections.

If Trudeau wins, that is also the same approach he hopes to use to put the Liberals back on a competitive footing with the Conservatives in 2015.

Stewart, who rose to the top ranks of the Obama team after delivering a surprise win in Iowa in 2008, was the man in charge of getting out the Democratic vote this year in all-important swing states such as Ohio and Florida, where Obama was triumphant over Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

The outreach to the Obama campaign by the Trudeau team shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

David Axelrod, Obama’s senior strategist, worked a decade ago with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, when the Liberal politician was still in opposition and looking for ways to take power from the Conservatives. And some of the top people in the Trudeau leadership campaign, including Gerald Butts, also worked in the Liberal leader’s office when Axelrod was offering his wisdom to McGuinty from 2000 to 2002.

Marie Bountrogianni, a former Ontario Liberal cabinet minister who is supporting Trudeau, was in Chicago and Iowa to help out in the final days of the U.S. presidential election this month and even stayed overnight at Axelrod’s country home in Michigan, along with a dozen other volunteers.

She said she was “blown away” by the high degree of sophistication in the Obama organization — the technology, the discipline and its ability to execute large shifts in strategy. Bountrogianni was initially assigned to be part of a get-out-the-vote (GOTV) brigade in Wisconsin, but dozens of volunteers were suddenly rerouted to Iowa, where they were greeted with new packages of call orders and scripts to follow. “I couldn’t believe how organized they were,” she said.

Liberals are in the midst of a large effort here to raise their own game in gathering databases and building home-grown technical sophistication, with hardware purchased from the Obama Democrats. Bountrogianni says Liberals should pay close attention to how the Obama team has pulled this off, especially among disengaged voters and with the help of masses of micro-donations.

Taleeb Noormohamed, who was also a federal Liberal candidate in the last election, went to Nevada to campaign for Obama in the final days of the presidential election too.

He said he was impressed by how much the Democrats had done to identify the vote before the election even began, and how much they knew about their potential voters. Noormohamed said Liberals could take some lessons from the Obama campaign in staking out strong positions on issues that will engage disaffected progressives — “stop being afraid to say where we stand” — and in doing as much as possible before the election to amass lists of possible Liberal support.

The new class of voting delegates for the federal Liberal leadership — “supporters,” as opposed to paying members — will be a big help in building that stockpile of information, Noormohamed said.

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