More strategic advice for those interested in a renewed NDP...

Building a Bigger Tent:
Politics and Policy to Win Back the Progressive Voter

In this article, also posted on the Straight Goods/NDP Convention website (http://www.ndp-econvention.ca/Eng/), Bob Penner, John Willis and David Kraft argue that the NDP needs to bring progressive policy to bear on the issues and programs that appeal to the large majority of Canadian voters. What voters focus on, Penner, Willis and Kraft argue, is whether or not the NDP can make concrete policy to turn party values into long-term reality, so a strategic repositioning for the party would start with efforts to focus not on core values, but on how those values can take shape in the real world.

Bob Penner is president and CEO of Strategic Communications, a Vancouver and Toronto political consulting firm specialising in communications, opinion research, and fundraising for advocacy groups and progressive political candidates. John Willis and David Kraft are Senior Consultants with Strategic Communications in Toronto. For further information, contact info@stratcom.ca.

Let's stop the bleating about values. Throughout the debate on the NDP's renewal this year, there have been many references to how 'most Canadians share the NDP's values', or expressed the other way around, that 'NDP values are the values of a majority of Canadians'. While these claims are true, this intersection of values actually doesn't tell us very much about winning elections. Values aren't votes. Just because at some philosophical level NDP views and the views of many Canadians intersect is not nearly a good enough reason for them to vote for us. Reminding them of our common values -- no matter how many times we do it -- is not likely to either.

In recent campaigns, the belief that this 'values intersect' can produce a successful outcome has led strategists to take the party 'back to the social democratic well' -- trying to remind people of our historical connection with certain social programs and their underlying values. Its final incarnation federally was in our famous, but unfortunate, two-word campaign ('Health Care,' in case you missed it) in 2000.

So how can lots of people share our values, have the same top concerns as we have, and even give us high ratings on those concerns (all positive electoral indicators) but still not vote for us? It's easy, as some opinion research we've done this year shows. Voters in our universe, (i.e. all voters who have not ruled out voting for us), give the following reasons.

* They believe that we really only represent a narrow band of interest, which usually does not include them. We represent unions, we represent the poor. But we don't represent business (any type of business), younger Canadians, or the majority of middle-income earners who see themselves as upwardly mobile, whatever the economic circumstances of the day. We don't represent soccer moms. And its not just because the media repeats these claims as nostrums -- they also believe it because it is largely true.

* We are not an effective voting choice, either because we can't win, or because we won't do a good job if we do win. Most people correctly perceive that the ability to represent and guide a diverse range of interests is critical to effective governance. A voter does not have to be in business, or any of the other constituencies that we don't represent, to be concerned about our ability to represent the broad spectrum of interests that is necessary to govern effectively.

* We simply aren't in consideration. This is particularly among younger voters, who tend to be far more disaffected with the electoral process. But beyond that they are far more disaffected with, or disinterested in, the NDP. We're boring, we're old, and we say the same things over and over and over again.

Build a bigger tent

Our research shows that overall, most voting-age Canadians still consider the NDP when they cast a ballot. Among this 'universe' of potential support, the NDP's values - equity, social solidarity, and the creation of participatory institutions -- are widely seen as essential to meeting key challenges of our times, including rebuilding universal health care and education, protecting the environment, and making the parliamentary system work for ordinary people.

At the Federal level and in many provinces, this means that most Liberal and Green voters -- plus a large slice of Tory supporters -- have no quibble with the NDP on values. Who doesn't want to live in a peaceful, fair, equitable society where everyone has access to high quality services, a sustainable income, and a good education for their children?

Digging below the surface, we believe a more important factor is the concern among voters that the NDP represents too narrow a social coalition to govern effectively. This is a very strong feature of opinion research that we conducted this year. As one participant in our focus group research, who has voted NDP in most elections, told us:

"From my point of view, the biggest problem with the NDP is that they only appeal to certain segments of the population -- the academics, the intellectuals, the radicals, radical young people, the seniors, though less so now, and labour..."

Though its values are highly regarded, the party's ability to get the job done, should it win power, is in doubt. This is a subtle, and challenging, claim: a majority of voters we talked to feel that the party just isn't interested in 'building a bigger tent,' that is, to demonstrate the capacity to shape credible policies that could win broad support within Canadian society. The party's ability to cut deals with the business community when necessary, for example, is particularly suspect, an observation that demonstrates just how hard-nosed voters in our universe really are. One voter we spoke to told us about these perceptions:

"I think the NDP's philosophy is something that I might agree with, but their specific policies leave something to be desired. They don't have a good solid policy when it comes to business that makes sense, and they could develop that within their philosophy."

To put it as bluntly as possible: most voters want the same things that the NDP wants, but the party stands accused of lacking the political skill to design the new policy tools to implement its core agenda and especially the skill to appeal beyond a narrow group of society.

We heard these perceptions from working class and younger voters as well as older, higher-income voters. They underpin the contradiction for many Canadians that they dearly want the NDP's values to rule the political roosts of the country, but feel the party is not the right political vehicle to make it so. It's political skill and policies appear to be worth less than the values that they seek to express.

How could the NDP appeal to a broader social cross-section and build the support that would in turn convince more voters to support the party at election time? Is this just another call for a 'move to the centre,' taking up a position that's practically inside the hegemonic Liberal Party? We think that the party's relentless focus on 'values' -- and the incorrect claim that only the NDP is defending those values - has become a liability rather than a strength. Instead of constantly defending values that are already shared by the majority of voters, the party's energy could better be spend on the question 'how?'

Repositioning the NDP

We need to create new ideas in the minds of the average voter about what we are and what we stand for, but unfortunately our communications strategies of recent years seem to achieve exactly the opposite effect. Our messaging has relied on the usual us/them dichotomy - 'working families versus the corporate elite' - which our party has become so fond of despite its almost total lack of recent electoral success. It's an approach that strikes us (and a large number of voters) as increasingly tired. It is always possible to get voters to make stark political choices in opinion testing, but in the real world this type of traditional NDP messaging simply does not move significant numbers of people to vote for us any longer.

This us/them approach can drive some of our (declining) base to us, but it drives everyone else away.

And one thing that our research did not show was any suggestion that voters in our universe are looking for the NDP to return to being a more traditional left wing or socialist party. In the qualitative research that we've done for the party and a variety of NGOs over the past two years, we did not encounter the complaint, frequently heard inside the party, that we have abandoned our roots. Concern over key social and environmental issues remains high, but voters in our universe generally do not see or articulate the solution as a question of moving 'left' or 'right'.

Instead, the Party needs to bring progressive policy to bear on the issues and programs that appeal to the large majority of Canadian voters whose concerns range from their economic situation to environmental sustainability to taxes, government waste, and local control, with most of the NDP's core issues in between. What voters focus on is whether we can make concrete policy to turn their values into long-term reality, so a strategic repositioning for the party would start with efforts to focus not on core values, but on how those values can take shape in the real world.

As a first step, we need to recognize that the policy message that often comes (or appears to come) from the party is 'spend more public money.' This is a message that strikes many, including 'progressive' voters, as one-dimensional and wrong. More funding from government is undoubtedly necessary in many fields, but our apparent focus on this aspect of policy sometimes represents a failure to address real problems that voters feel exist.

For years the NDP, sometimes under pressure from its public-sector union members, has defended just about all government spending as appropriate and attacked just about all government cost-savings as inappropriate. We have trouble calling for cuts in the military budget for just this reason. We are unable to talk about government waste. We've had difficulty talking about homecare, despite the fact that it's such an important element of healthcare reform, because there are fewer union jobs involved in providing it. Although in government we've realised we can't just spend our way out of problems in income support, healthcare, and education, in our campaigns and policy we often say we can, or we don't say we can't loudly enough. And although our position is sometimes more nuanced than that, these nuances do not register with voters, so it's all too easy for them to identify with our opponents' claims that we are a 'tax and spend' party.

Voters share the NDP's description of the problems. It's the solutions they find unconvincing. Today's hard-nosed voter views the party's focus on spending as idealistic in an age of dramatic tax cuts and strict spending controls. And their scepticism about spending as the main route to achieve their goals is compounded by their perception that there's more to the problems in public life than a lack of money. In other words, a voter doesn't have to be right wing to think that in some cases more government spending is wasteful, wrong-headed, or even pointless.

Politics and Policy

We believe that there are some credible and pratical themes and policies that the NDP should grab and claim for itself, one being the need for greater accountability by governments to citizens. That's an area that the NDP has ceded to the right, under-appreciating the groundswell of popular frustration with undemocratic and unresponsive government services. Instead, we frequently find ourselves defending outmoded institutions, a stance that's become a powerful weapon not only against the NDP, but against many progressive policies as a result.

But more importantly we think the NDP can define a 'new pole of attraction' that is resolutely progressive but not bound to the traditional left/right divisions of politics. To name just a few possible examples:

* The party can stop assigning exclusive responsibility for social services to governments, and champion a new role for community institutions, non-profit organizations, and individuals.

* In education, the party should appeal to Canadians worried about the quality of teaching and the curriculum. On these issues, as well as on the traditional NDP education issues such as class size and job cuts, the party should build policy from the best in pedagogical research.

* In healthcare, the party should create and promote a truly workable financial model of universal access and quality care, above all other considerations.

* And it can do a lot more to build a progressive coalition around the need for a sustainable economy that promotes the preservation of forests, fisheries, our atmosphere, water, and wilderness. It is here that the 'more is better' economic policy of traditional social democracy has its worst expression. Using growth as the main vehicle to solve our economic problems is a completely unsustainable - and dangerous - concept that's been thoroughly discredited by the environmental movement and some economic thinkers. But the urgent need to abandon the old way of doing things hasn't fully registered (with some notable and significant exceptions) for the NDP.

The party's relationship and approach to the business community could be an important marker-point for the average citizen about how we see ourselves. We rail against the 'corporate elite' as if there is no distinction between small business and large, or between regressive and progressive businesses, without acknowledging what almost all voters and many in the party realize -- that we won't be able to govern effectively without being able to work with business. Wishing away the private sector won't make it so, and looking at our relationship to them practically, as opposed to ideologically, is what most of today's voter expect from us. Starting to do so may just show a number of voters that we can look at issues in new ways and are not locked in the past.

The NDP must appeal to voters on grounds that it is not only money and new spending that solves our problems. New and more democratic institutions, market mechanisms, community action and self-reliance all have a role in building a better society and the NDP should be the party putting those elements together in a new progressive 'common front'. We should not be in the business of asking Canadians to come back to the fold of social justice, equity and fairness. They never left. Our business is to show Canadians how we can breathe new life into our common values. The goal has to be to get good, principled policy implemented, rather than to show how committed we are to our ideals.

We believe that Canadians deserve a political party that can achieve major reforms in our society, so we have to take seriously voters such as a man who told us that "from my point of view, the biggest problem with the NDP is [that they have] idealistic policies at the expense of all else."

We do not envision any less progressive policy by the party, but we do envision policy that adopts and advocates concrete, innovative solutions that appeal to a broad cross-section of Canadians. The reason to be optimistic is this: Canadians by and large agree with us on fundamentals. Canadians are progressive, compassionate, and they prefer collective solutions over individualistic ones. The bad news is Canadians face a political impasse. They no longer believe it's practical to expect government to do all the heavy lifting, and they seek policies that reflect their core values while making realistic demands on individuals, communities, and other institutions in Canadian society.

As to the future, tinkering won't do it. We need major changes in our ideas and the policies that express them. We need effective and strong leadership. And most of all, we need change in our approach to the public. By making 'doable,' 'workable,' and 'interesting' the main adjectives of our politics, the NDP in many parts of the country could improve it's standing with voters, move back into the mainstream of political life, and start winning a larger block of voters at election time.

The failures-to-come of non-NDP governments are bound to push at least some voters back our way, but we don't believe that this is enough, on its own, to significantly alter party fortunes any time soon. We need to convince people that we are a new type of party -- convince them, that is, because it becomes true. We need to become a party that can represent and broker broad constituencies of interests, not just our traditional ones; a party that can manage itself and the jurisdictions it governs effectively; a party that can represent the beliefs of a large number of moderate, progressive voters (of which, it is true, there are still many) with new approaches to policies that resonate with them. If we don't do it, someone else will.

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