I never get a good response when I call for audience participation but I'll try it again. I'd love to challenge anyone reading this post to add a comment with their own lists/thoughts on this subject - anonymously or otherwise. If you have a blog and are desperate for content ideas, feel free to steal this idea as well! Or respond to it.
(My only suggestion if you plan to do your own list - don't read mine first. I'm curious whether people would come up with the same things as me or not.)
FIVE THINGS THAT HAD THE BIGGEST IMPACT IN THE 2009 SASK NDP LEADERSHIP RACE
1. Advance Voting
Did I read somewhere that Ryan Meili got something like 75% of the votes of people who chose to wait until the convention day, hear all the presentations and endorsements, see the buzz for each candidate before making their own choice? If so, it's tempting to re-imagine the results had everyone been required to wait until the day of the convention to vote. A couple real life examples - we had one woman at our table who said she was torn between Ryan and Yens based on everything she'd seen so far. After the floor shows were over, I asked, "So?" and she just smiled and asked if she could have one of the Ryan buttons I'd offered her earlier. I also heard from a couple people who said they would've changed the order of their vote based on the floor shows. I'm sure many others felt the same way. I still love the idea of every individual member being able to vote by a variety of methods (by mail, phone, online or in person) but perhaps limiting the vote only to the day of the convention would reduce the chances of people re-thinking (or regretting!) their choices? (Can you imagine if the news of the membership scandal had broken on June 3, only a couple days before the convention and after most early votes were already in?)
2. Baby Boomers
I made this point on my blog before when discussing some of Ryan's biggest challenges and I suspect that ultimately, there was a huge portion of the NDP's membership who are baby boomers (roughly everyone between 45-64 years of age) that identified most closely with Dwain Lingenfelter as a contemporary whereas the idea of Ryan as party leader was about as palatable as the idea of putting their own Gen X kid in charge of the family business no matter how accomplished or successful that young whippersnapper was otherwise.
3. Yens Pedersen Conceding
Yens Pedersen withdrawing when he did after the first ballot right after Deb Higgins was eliminated, meant that nearly all of his support went to Ryan. Had he waited for a third ballot, Link would've likely gone over the top with enough support from Deb supporters who picked him second, leaving both Yens and Ryan in a more marginalized position rather than the final result which made for a much closer result in the end and stronger showing for the progressive wing of the party. Again, you can't re-write history but I can't help but wonder what might have transpired if Yens had been eliminated first and Deb was still in the field as most people expected. Would she have withdrawn as well leading to a similar finish or would she have hung on to send things to a third ballot which may have diminished Ryan's strong finish?
4. The Money Bomb
Even more than the cash infusion it gave to Ryan's campaign at a critical time, even more than confirming Ryan as the most innovative user of new technology, the biggest impact of the money bomb may turn out to be that doubled Ryan's total number of donors which, if I can make one last Obama parallel
, gives Ryan a much bigger mailing list for any future endeavours he may
undertake - whether it's his own political future or directing support
towards other candidates he's backing.5. The YouTube & Floor Show Videos
Ryan released a series of campaign policy videos that I found stunning in how professional and engaging they were. For a candidate without the resources to visit every constituency like Link was doing, this put them on a more level playing field - anyone who wanted to learn more about Ryan and where he stood would get a very good idea after viewing even one or two of these videos. The floor show video was even better and I'm glad when offered the chance to see a preview in the days leading up to the convention, I said no. I decided that I wanted to see this video the way everyone else would - like going to the opening night of a big summer blockbuster for the shared experience. I'm glad I made that choice - seeing it for the first time was one of the highlights of this entire campaign for me. The impact of the floor show video also ties into my first point that if everybody who voted was required to vote on the day of the convention, we may just have had a different result than we ended up with!
Bonus: Name Recognition
It's unfortunate but it was quite clear as I was doing my calling for Ryan that a lot of people didn't appear to even realise that there was a leadership race on or weren't really paying attention if they did know. So this vital decision that will have major implications for the future of our province was partly in the hands of people who were going to receive a ballot, see one name they recognized and send it off. I had more than one older member who told me some variation of "I always vote NDP!" clearly not realising that all of the choices *were* NDP. So if they see a ballot on it with one recognizable NDP name, that's a pretty big hurdle to overcome.
FIVE THINGS THAT HAD LESS IMPACT IN THE 2009 SASK NDP LEADERSHIP RACE THAN YOU'D EXPECT
1. The Membership Scandal
This was the elephant in the room at the convention and I was surprised how little attention it got except in subtle allusions and whispered side conversations. Yes, the party did a report that cleared Dwain Lingenfelter of any wrongdoing but the day after the convention ended (nice timing there!), the RCMP announced they were investigating the matter then a couple days later, announced that it had become a criminal investigation. Some people are able to let bygones by bygones and chalk it up to "just politics" or "that's behind us now" but I think there are also a number of people who saw "Waterhengate" as going beyond the usual attacks and back and forth you might see in a political campaign. (Since I keep rewriting history in this post, I should also note that the flip side is that Ryan might not have had as strong of showing as he did had this scandal not happened.)
2. Deb Higgins
As I said above, not too many people expected Yens Pedersen to come in ahead of Deb Higgins. If you paired off the candidates that were most similar, Ryan and Yens were an obvious match - both the "renewal" candidates, both very progressive, both courting the youth vote. For a variety of reasons, Ryan pulled ahead in all of these areas and it appeared that Yens was being left in the dust. Dwain and Deb were also very similar - experienced with long histories in the party and actual time in the Legislature on their resumes. But their differences were also more striking and I might've thought that alone would've been enough to gain Deb more votes over Dwain than Yens took from Ryan (if that makes sense - re-reading it, I'm not sure that it does!
)
But as just one example, Deb didn't really play the "first female
leader of the party"
card very much from what I saw but that might've been one way to gain a
lot more support than she ended up with. Anyhow, I can't be too hard
on her - she's ended up as
Deputy Party leader after all!3. Traditional Media
I'm so completely biased here as I already think traditional media are a dying breed that I'll admit that I'm probably wrong about the type of impact traditional media had on this race. I mean, simply on the basis of the audience that a Leader Post columnist or a NewsTalk radio host has, obviously, their having an impact is inevitable to some degree. And whether it was Stefani Langenneger's line about Ryan being "a social democratic doctor living the social democratic life" being seized by the Meili campaign as an unofficial slogan to John Gormley's warming to Ryan, just because he didn't refuse to appear on his radio show, they were definitely part of the narrative of this entire campaign. But I guess my point here is two-fold - the first is that there seemed to be very little attention given to the race - at least until the membership scandal happened and then, the coverage often tended towards the sensational and confrontational rather than in-depth analysis.
4. Lorne Calvert (and Roy Romanow and Allan Blakeney)
I did a tongue-in-cheek post where I begged kindly asked Lorne Calvert to endorse Ryan. I didn't expect a response and it was one of the few times in this race that I was right about something!
As I said at the time, I understand all the reasons why senior party
figures have to seen to be neutral. But at the same time, where is the
democracy if they're not allowed to share their opinions just like any
other member of the party? Those who are in roles that may impact the outcome (President, etc.) with their decisions should stay neutral of course. But how does it
strengthen the party when the men who arguably know best what it needs
have to sit on their hands while the race runs its course without their
valuable perspective? Which leads directly to my next point...5. "New" Politics
The idea that politics can be done in a new way - that you don't necessarily start from the position that the Sask Party are The Enemy but that they're good, decent Saskatchewan people who just happen to have different views than you. (Note: I said you *start* from that point!) Or that you can talk about things rather than shouting about things. Or that you don't go on a talk radio show just because the host is a conservative and you're the leader of a social democratic party. All of those ideas about new ways to do things didn't seem to have a major impact in this race. I guess even the new political idea that's been proven in so many places and political races in the last few years - that Web 2.0 has the ability to overcome otherwise insurmountable odds - wasn't proven here. At least not yet. But whether Ryan's running for leader in 2012 should the Sask Party happens to win again and Link decide to step aside or if the NDP pulls out a victory in 2011 and Ryan has to wait for his chance to come around again in 2015 or 2019, as I've said a million times before the impact of the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies will only continue to grow. The Internet has changed how we think, how we see the world and how we interact. And I firmly believe that this influence extends to the way that we will do politics in the future as well.
(Jason hands out guitars - everyone to sing "Kumbaya".)
