Original article is behind The Star's paywall:
https://canadatoday.news/on/why-did...thing-assessment-of-electoral-failure-171277/
‘Why didn’t we see this coming?’ Ontario Liberals release scathing review of election failure
There problems didn't lie w/ 'get the vote out' machine.
The Ford vote barely turned out either, same for the NDP.
The machine was not the issue.
Certainly, the leader was a remarkably unhelpful choice, and I won't abide any discussion of that being surprising, no one with a two-digit IQ would come to different conclusion, let alone a 3-digit one.
The reality is the Liberals (as with most parties) allow their leader to be determined by vote-buying.......cough, membership selling, which means candidates aren't even remotely elected on their perceived merits.
No one thought Del Duca could win; he just sold the most memberships.......
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Truthfully, the platform was pathetic. Most people aren't policy wonks and don't know 80-90% of what any party proposed.
What they know are 2-3 headline items the media give play.
Those items need to accomplish two things; make the idea of electing party 'x' attractive; and not making party 'x' look unattractive.
Its not complicated.
Harper's winning pitch (bad policy though it was) cut the GST by 2 points. Everyone understood it, and many liked it.
Trudeau, legalize pot, that was his biggest winner the first time out.
Its not that everyone wanted to smoke up, its that many people believed it was silly for it be illegal and that a tax-windfall could be had to everyone's benefit.
Plus some people wanted to smoke up, LOL
Easy to understand, prominent, simple, clear, easy to judge a party on (you did or did not deliver this).
That, and some well placed marketing does wonders.
Trudeau's escalator ad resonated with people. Brilliant, maybe not, sincere........meh; but funny and effective in portraying the Harper gov't as behind the times........yes.
You don't need a genius to tell you any of this, nor a report dozens of pages long. You need to not be in a coma; and have some measure of intellectual coherence.