Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them by Susan Delacourt Page A
Authors: Susan Delacourt
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were in the midst of the space race.
In other words, the opinion-leaders may be seized with science and the Cold War, but ordinary working folks, the young marrieds, just wanted their consumer needs met, maybe with some mellow, non-excitable music on their afternoon commute home to the suburbs. There were echoes here of Spencer’s findings in 1940s Toronto and foreshadowing too for what would become a political-polling truism for decades ahead: matters of high politics hold little interest for “ordinary” Canadians. (In tone and intent, it’s not all that different from the populist rhetoric that ran through the Mike Harris “Common Sense Revolution” in Ontario in the 1990s or the federal Conservatives’ conviction in the 2008 and 2011 elections that Canadians cared more about pocketbook issues than pointy-headed debates about the environment, parliamentary democracy or Afghan detainees. It’s probably the kind of advice that went into Stephen Harper’s decision to skip the UN meeting in 2009 and head to Tim Hortons instead.)
A decade after Davey had embraced polling in earnest as a basic implement in the Liberal campaign toolkit, this notion of Canadians as selfish consumers, above all, had solidified in findings of the Liberals’ American pollsters. Here’s a July 1971 bit of analysis from Penetration Research, passed along in what was titled “A Survey of the Political Climate in Canada”:
The other side of the coin is unemployment, or jobs. This is unquestionably the top issue in the nation today. A great number of Canadians regard themselves as living in hard times and this concern dwarfs their concern about everything else. Sometimes we tend to forget that human beings are basically and instinctively selfish. Those in the press and in government tend to talk to each other to the exclusion of the masses. In the process, such people often convince themselves that what they regard to be important is what people generally regard to be important. A major finding of this survey is that foreign policy, Canadian unity, relations with the US, Constitutional reform, pollution and other such matters are not at all the big issues, any of them. All other issues are secondary to the wish for better times in Canada, and this issue is more important today than it has ever been in the nine years we have been conducting surveys of public opinion in this nation.
Davey, despite his sales background, believed there was a distinction between selling a product and selling a politician. For him, politics was more like sports, or at times a religion. But for the man who would become one of Davey’s chief allies in the Liberal inner circle, Martin Goldfarb, there was valuable political information in how Canadians behaved in the consumer marketplace. He’d been the one, after all, who in 1971 made the link between selling politicians and selling tomatoes. In that same article, he said that this newfangled polling business could be crucial in reaching as much as 10 percent of the electorate, whose vote swings could determine the fate of an election. At the time, 10 percent was considered a large figure—most Canadians’ loyalty to their chosen political parties was long and deep, often going back generations, and they didn’t tend to use election campaigns to “shop” for another preference.
The Anthropologist
Martin Goldfarb had grown up with his two brothers in a tiny apartment over a grocery store that his parents operated on Dundas Street West in Toronto. He had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and then a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Toronto. For a while after graduating he taught high school, but then he started doing some survey work on the side with MacLaren Advertising. He saw this moonlighting job as the perfect outlet for his anthropology training and started to apply many of the analytical skills he had learned at university to his work. Within five
In other words, the opinion-leaders may be seized with science and the Cold War, but ordinary working folks, the young marrieds, just wanted their consumer needs met, maybe with some mellow, non-excitable music on their afternoon commute home to the suburbs. There were echoes here of Spencer’s findings in 1940s Toronto and foreshadowing too for what would become a political-polling truism for decades ahead: matters of high politics hold little interest for “ordinary” Canadians. (In tone and intent, it’s not all that different from the populist rhetoric that ran through the Mike Harris “Common Sense Revolution” in Ontario in the 1990s or the federal Conservatives’ conviction in the 2008 and 2011 elections that Canadians cared more about pocketbook issues than pointy-headed debates about the environment, parliamentary democracy or Afghan detainees. It’s probably the kind of advice that went into Stephen Harper’s decision to skip the UN meeting in 2009 and head to Tim Hortons instead.)
A decade after Davey had embraced polling in earnest as a basic implement in the Liberal campaign toolkit, this notion of Canadians as selfish consumers, above all, had solidified in findings of the Liberals’ American pollsters. Here’s a July 1971 bit of analysis from Penetration Research, passed along in what was titled “A Survey of the Political Climate in Canada”:
The other side of the coin is unemployment, or jobs. This is unquestionably the top issue in the nation today. A great number of Canadians regard themselves as living in hard times and this concern dwarfs their concern about everything else. Sometimes we tend to forget that human beings are basically and instinctively selfish. Those in the press and in government tend to talk to each other to the exclusion of the masses. In the process, such people often convince themselves that what they regard to be important is what people generally regard to be important. A major finding of this survey is that foreign policy, Canadian unity, relations with the US, Constitutional reform, pollution and other such matters are not at all the big issues, any of them. All other issues are secondary to the wish for better times in Canada, and this issue is more important today than it has ever been in the nine years we have been conducting surveys of public opinion in this nation.
Davey, despite his sales background, believed there was a distinction between selling a product and selling a politician. For him, politics was more like sports, or at times a religion. But for the man who would become one of Davey’s chief allies in the Liberal inner circle, Martin Goldfarb, there was valuable political information in how Canadians behaved in the consumer marketplace. He’d been the one, after all, who in 1971 made the link between selling politicians and selling tomatoes. In that same article, he said that this newfangled polling business could be crucial in reaching as much as 10 percent of the electorate, whose vote swings could determine the fate of an election. At the time, 10 percent was considered a large figure—most Canadians’ loyalty to their chosen political parties was long and deep, often going back generations, and they didn’t tend to use election campaigns to “shop” for another preference.
The Anthropologist
Martin Goldfarb had grown up with his two brothers in a tiny apartment over a grocery store that his parents operated on Dundas Street West in Toronto. He had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and then a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Toronto. For a while after graduating he taught high school, but then he started doing some survey work on the side with MacLaren Advertising. He saw this moonlighting job as the perfect outlet for his anthropology training and started to apply many of the analytical skills he had learned at university to his work. Within five
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