Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them by Susan Delacourt

“political strategy.”
    “Most people knocking on doors during campaigns have a difficult time sorting out strategy from tactics. They become consumed with the tactical side of campaigning which, of course, is a very significant component. Far more important, of course, is the overall strategic game plan. In the final analysis any campaign comes down to the major issue, whether it is a personality or a policy… Having determined the best issue, then that becomes the issue of the campaign. Polling is extremely useful in making this determination.”
    Even though polls had been kicking around in Canadian politics for a couple of decades, the 1962 election was the first real faceoff between modern political polling methods. In the Financial Post in April of that year, journalist Richard Gwyn wrote that Canada was about to have its “first scientific election.” He described the public opinion surveys and statistical analysis as “completely new weapons” in the political arsenal. As Gwyn saw it, this would be the campaign in which the imprecise arts of politics would be challenged by “the skills of sociologists, statisticians, advertising experts, pollsters and mass-communications experts.”
    The “science” in that election was mainly on the Liberal side, and it clearly wasn’t sufficient. Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker, who had famously said that “dogs know best what to do with polls” and “polls are for dogs,” still put his trust in the old-fashioned, populist arts of politics. (He never forgot that the Gallup organization had put the Liberals fourteen points ahead on the eve of the 1957 election that brought him to office.) Conservatives were able to hang on to power in the 1962 election, despite all the fancy poll-work and science that Davey was trying to bring to the Liberal side. Part of that victory was owed to a much more complicated electoral dynamic. A newly formed New Democratic Party had arrived on the scene in time for the 1962 campaign, strongly backed by organized labour and fed by western, rural populism and a demand for medicare. But a year later, with Davey still investing tens of thousands of dollars in repeated national polls by Harris, the Liberals finally wrested power from the Conservatives.
    Harris’s firm would continue to supply the Liberals with polling material and insights into the minds of voters through the 1960s—even if some of these insights were also gained through extensive work in the United States. Periodically in its reports, Penetration Research would acknowledge its Americanisms for its Canadian Liberal party readers. “Through years of pounding out hundreds of reports for candidates scattered through the fifty United States, our typewriters have become habituated to spellings such as ‘labor,’ ‘connection’ and ‘defense’ and to such locutions as ‘the government is’; we will attempt to correct these mannerisms, but habit dies hard and we apologize for the slips that will undoubtedly clutter the report,” the writers noted in one of their 1960s-era surveys on the political climate in Ontario.
    Lou Harris’s firm also had some blunt convictions about the limits of voters’ interest or enthusiasm for matters of state, just as Philip Spencer had warned readers of the Canadian Forum a couple of decades earlier. Repeatedly in its reports to the Liberals in the 1960s and 1970s, Penetration Research would stress the pre-eminence of “bread-and-butter” issues in the minds of citizens. Consumer concerns would always trump weightier matters, Harris’s analysts kept telling the Liberals, despite what the media or the political class maintain to be priorities.
    “Nor is there any hint of the frequent suggestion from the press, pulpit and soapbox that university educational opportunities and facilities must be expanded to meet the challenge of the Russians in science and technology,” an October 1960 study said, when the US and Soviet Union