The dust is settling at last on what was supposed to be Canada’s first fully “data-driven” election. All three main parties spent vast sums of time, money and effort developing extensive databases on the Canadian electorate — to analyze our desires and intentions, to target us with more precise messages, to manage events and organize volunteers, and to make sure that we actually went out and voted.

All parties take their voter lists from Election Canada, and then add data from a variety of sources: doorstep canvassing, telephone polling, census data, information from associated local campaigns, petition drives and social media. The Conservatives started this trend about ten years ago when they built the Conservative Information Management Systems (CIMS). The Liberals and New Democrats followed suit.

The databases are supposed to allow parties to engage in “micro-targeting” — the identification of key segments of the electorate in swing ridings who might be swayed one way or the other by a key message or issue. And the parties did an awful lot of micro-targeting during this campaign — a pledge for a tax break here, an investment there. Micro-targeting was the motivation behind the Conservatives’ use of the niqab as a wedge issue, which ended up damaging the NDP to the Liberals’ benefit.

Turns out there’s a problem with micro-targeting, however: it doesn’t work all that well when everybody’s doing it. Voters find themselves being wooed with similar promises based on the same data; after a while, they forget who is promising what. Micro-targeted platform planks end up cancelling each other out, and voters get turned off. When parties “shop for votes” — to borrow the title of iPolitics columnist Susan Delacourt’s book — the cumulative noise of one micro-promise after another confuses any sense of an overall vision or message.

In the final analysis, micro-targeting wasn’t very relevant to this campaign. This was an election decided by fundamental choices between “staying the course”, “change” and “real change” — one where the ground shifted under the major parties and millions of Canadians cast their votes on the sole basis of accepting or rejecting the Harper government.

So did the digital campaign have any real effect on the outcome? Can we infer from the Liberals’ victory that they had a better digital strategy, better data, better and more responsive analytics? Or was it all pretty irrelevant in the final analysis? I see a couple of broad conclusions emerging here, in part from what campaign workers themselves have been saying.

For starters, the Liberals have clearly caught up to, if not surpassed, the Conservatives when it comes to campaign data collection and management. For several election cycles, the Conservatives’ CIMS database was considered far superior to the system employed by the Liberals (called Liberalist) or the NDP. The more extensive data in CIMS allowed the Conservatives to find and mobilize their supporters more efficiently. In elections fought over precise, narrow segments of the electorate and micro-targeted policy promises, this advantage was crucial.

Social media cannot change the fundamental dynamics of a campaign. No number of tweets or Facebook likes was going to reverse the decline of the NDP in the final weeks of the campaign. But social media can, and does, reinforce impressions for supporters, and for undecided voters. Social media cannot change the fundamental dynamics of a campaign. No number of tweets or Facebook likes was going to reverse the decline of the NDP in the final weeks of the campaign. But social media can, and does, reinforce impressions for supporters, and for undecided voters.

I suspect that the impressive ‘ground-game’ delivered by the Liberals this time will convince some in the party, and outside, that their data were much better this time than in the past — perhaps better than that of the Tories.

After the last election, the Liberals based their Liberalist party database on the Voter Activation Network platform pioneered by the Obama for America campaign, and now used by many progressive parties and groups across the United States. Those who have used this system claim that it is more responsive, and allows a better integration of information on voters from different sources. It is supposedly more efficient at providing more relevant data on voters in a timely fashion, and at delivering the right message to the right voter at the right time, using the right medium. The VAN system is not just a stand-alone database but an integrated platform that provides the campaign with all the tools necessary for successful voter engagement.

It also comes with a handy app for smartphones and tablets (MiniVan), allowing canvassers to quickly and efficiently feed information received on the doorstep into the Liberalist system.

I don’t think it’s possible to conclude that the Liberals won because they had a better system than they had in 2011. But I suspect it was one of the reasons for their success. They have closed the gap.

Both CIMS and the NDP database (Populus) were developed in-house. We will probably see both parties take a close look at these systems over the coming months. Indeed, it was reported that the Conservatives had already developed a new system (C-Vote) in 2014, but later scrapped it.

This was also supposed to be the first social media election — one where Canadian parties would fully embrace the promise of social media platforms and engage the electorate in a multitude of digital ways. Social media provided not only new platforms for broadcasting messages, but opportunities to find supporters and donors.

Justin Trudeau did have more Twitter followers than either Stephen Harper or Tom Mulcair. The Liberals also made creative use of personalized videos, and used Facebook for their “50-second challenge” ads. Perhaps the people who used social media in the most creative ways during the election were the Greens.

But again, it’s impossible to conclude that the digital campaign was determinative. Social media cannot change the fundamental dynamics of a campaign. No number of tweets or Facebook likes was going to reverse the decline of the NDP in the final weeks of the campaign.

But social media can, and does, reinforce impressions for supporters, and for undecided voters. In this respect, the positive and upbeat image of Trudeau could be accentuated, and he could come across as someone fundamentally at home in this young and vibrant medium. For Harper and Mulcair, it was more of a stretch.

The parties, and their consultants, will no doubt try to draw various lessons from these experiences. I suspect, however, that they will not give up on the quest for more and more refined and accurate data on the Canadian electorate. Once in place, these technologies tend to assume a life of their own. Even though this was an election of big choices, doubtless there will be many who will argue that the digital strategy let them down.

So the ‘data-driven’ campaign is here to stay, as is the relentless drive for more and more accurate data on the Canadian voter. And that, as I have argued before, has some significant implications for our privacy.

Colin Bennett is a professor of political science at the University of Victoria. He is co-author of a report to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner on Privacy Protection and Canada’s Federal Political Parties.

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