OTTAWA—“Everybody’s second choice” isn’t a terribly inspiring political rallying cry, but it turns out it can be an effective one.

As Conservative members made their way into the party’s leadership vote on May 27, volunteers for Andrew Scheer cheerfully handed out buttons supporting their candidate.

The buttons didn’t ask anyone to make Scheer their top pick for leader on the party’s ranked ballots — the volunteers figured members’ minds had already been made up on that front. Instead, the buttons read “Andrew Scheer is my Second Choice.”

That, according to the man behind Scheer’s upset victory, was the key to the entire campaign.

“We couldn’t write off the second choice votes from any candidate. We had to be able to get second choice votes from Pierre Lemieux, and Michael Chong, and Lisa Raitt, and Erin O’Toole. Even from Kellie Leitch,” said Hamish Marshall, Scheer’s longtime friend and campaign manager.

“We needed to be able to exist in a way that we could get votes from all of those (candidates), while at the same time saying enough interesting things in order to get enough coverage and get enough first place votes in order to compete.

“And that was the essential tension of the campaign. How do we make sure whatever we do we’re going to get the support, being able to compete for seconds with every other candidate, while also still standing for something. And that was the daily, weekly balancing act.”

Marshall was one of a core group of about five staff who encouraged Scheer to run for the Conservative leadership — and who ensured the mild-mannered MP from Regina won.

Marshall and Scheer have been close since they started working on Parliament Hill in 2001. While Scheer opted to run for elected politics, Marshall stayed out of public life, opting instead to run campaigns from the war room. And he’s proven very effective in that role.

Marshall was part of the 2006 Conservative campaign that saw Stephen Harper rise to power. He worked in strategic planning in Harper’s first PMO and served as the party’s official pollster in 2008. He successfully ran a grassroots campaign opposing a transit tax in Vancouver.

In Conservative circles, Marshall is known for having a deep understanding not just of the party’s internal politics, but of the mood and direction of Canada’s conservative movement.

In the wake of Scheer’s surprise victory, much of the news coverage has focused on how social conservatives — conservatives guided by religious convictions on issues like abortion or same-sex marriage — clinched the race for the former Speaker of the House of Commons. Scheer has voted along social conservative lines in the past, but has vowed not to reopen debates over abortion or gay marriage.

Marshall said that although the “so-cons” played a role, Scheer’s numbers in Quebec were the decisive factor in defeating Maxime Bernier.

On Friday, the Conservative party said it had full confidence in the leadership vote, despite concerns raised by Bernier’s supporters.

A media report said there was a discrepancy between the total number of votes cast in the Conservative leadership race and the final voter ID list provided to the 13 leadership campaigns.

In all, the party counted roughly 141,000 votes and determined that Scheer won a razor-thin majority of support ahead of Bernier. Unofficial lists provided to the campaigns and culled from the party’s central database, however, listed approximately 133,000 voters, a large enough discrepancy to potentially alter the final outcome. But the party chalked the discrepancy up to human error, with volunteers failing to upload some voters to the central database.

In Quebec, Scheer’s point man was a guy named Marc-André Leclerc.

Former colleagues describe Leclerc as a media-savvy strategist who has close ties with the Conservatives’ small Quebec caucus. Leclerc is believed to be a big reason four Conservative MPs from Quebec endorsed Scheer, rather than native sons Bernier or Steven Blaney.

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He also worked with dairy farmers who vehemently opposed Bernier’s promise to dismantle supply management, a political third rail in Quebec.

“Mr. Scheer spent a lot of time on the ground. And I think this is the key,” Leclerc said in an interview.

“Too many people in every campaign waste their time on communications and strategy. But leadership races are not about that — it’s about membership and get out the vote.”

In Western Canada, Scheer depended on Joan Baylis, his longtime constituency assistant and campaign staffer, and a team of volunteers across that region. Baylis, who joked she’s “semi-retired” after the marathon campaign, has been with Scheer since he first ran for his Regina seat in 2004.

When Baylis talks about Scheer, it sounds like she’s talking about a favoured nephew. When asked, Baylis says she feels like Scheer is family and that he treats her and her husband the same way.

“I’m not an emotional, huggy person. I don’t hug people easily,” Baylis said. “(After the vote) I just wrapped my arms around him and I just hugged him, I just held onto him for dear life.”

“I said, ‘Oh my goodness, all your hard work, all your efforts.’ He has been and will be a very hard worker, devoted to his constituents. . . . It all panned out for him. I was so excited.”

The last two members of Scheer’s core team — Kenzie Potter, Scheer’s longtime Ottawa assistant, and Mike Macdonell, a strategist working in Ottawa, could not be reached for this article.

Potter has been Scheer’s chief of staff since 2011. Before that, according to a Hill Times report at the time, she worked with well-known Conservative MPs Jay Hill and Chuck Strahl. Potter was one of the more accessible staffers during Harper’s majority years, in part owing to the independence of the Speaker.

Macdonell, who ran for the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservatives in 2013, comes from a big political family. His uncle, John MacDonell, is the former president of the Nova Scotia PCs and served as chief of staff to Peter MacKay in Ottawa. John MacDonell worked for Erin O’Toole’s leadership bid, no doubt making for interesting family dinners.

Scheer’s slim margin won him the right to lead the Conservatives into the 2019 election. His team put his chances of victory close to 15 per cent the day before the party vote. The plan to snatch up second choices worked in the Conservatives’ ranked-ballot system — and issues like supply management and support from social conservatives broke his way.

But a new strategy will be required in the general election against the formidable electoral machine of the Liberal Party of Canada and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In that contest, being voters’ second choice is not a recipe for success.

But Scheer attracted considerable caucus support and a team of staff that proved steady hands on the tiller. Those factors, combined with the Conservative party’s strong fundraising efforts and a sizable membership list, are a good head start.

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