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Alberta Politics

Trump Never Had A Chance

Guest Post by Chris Henderson

Seemingly every day, someone tells me that they’re worried Donald Trump will win the election. Aside from the natural anxiety that comes with a  potentially catastrophic (yet still remote) possibility, I really don’t believe Trump winning is even remotely realistic. Here’s why:

1. Trump has no ground game.

Every modern election is won on ground game. Candidates can’t rely on speeches and cable news appearances. They need an army of people and tools to reach out to millions of voters throughout the election, collect data and guide campaign decisions. This matters. It defines your strategy and it helps you convert voters on the margins – the ones that you need to help you win swing states.

Building this infrastructure is essentially the modern-day purpose of the US primary nomination system. Parties believe that the successful nominee will emerge with (and because of) a sophisticated and mature ground game infrastructure to head into the general election. Trump didn’t do this. He coasted on a unique mix of populism and the anger of 13 million voters to help him rise to the top of a diverse and crowded GOP nomination field. He went into the General with no ground game, he has failed to build one since. In fact, he’s been piggybacking on the (comparatively weak) Republican infrastructure to get him through. That was a bad strategy in the first place and now after the GTBTP (Grab Them By The *cat emoji*) debacle, that resource appears to be out of his reach.

2. This is not a professional campaign operation.

Professionalized politics starts at the very top – with the candidate. A candidate sets the tone, drives the policy and starts the strategy. They attract and retain talented staff to make it all real and turn it into votes. The campaign staff create diverse and smart opportunities for the candidate to go out and represent and augment that strategy and policy. While a candidate is in charge of the campaign, a professional staff will set limits. Professional campaigns do not allow candidates to rant on Twitter at 3am. They don’t allow a candidate to skip debate prep. They don’t film half-apologies at midnight. They don’t allow a candidate to spend a week fixated on a single non-campaign issue. They don’t allow the rest of the party to abandon its Presidential candidate. They don’t outright insult and alienate people like Mitt Romney and John McCain. Trump’s campaign is completely bereft of all of these qualities.

3. He’s checkmated himself with his own rhetoric and bluster.

Donald Trump has built a campaign on a style that attracts a large number of voters who, by and large, are disenfranchised with the direction of America and the type of people who have been traditionally tasked with leading it. That’s fair enough. And it was a smart strategy to win the GOP primary, especially with Obama in office. Applying that strategy to the General election has brought him within close to striking distance of a chance at winning.

Here’s his biggest problem. He needs more than this relatively reliable cohort to win. He needs to capture the votes of more moderate, independent voters who are mailable or undecided. With the stark nature of the offence in his GTBTP video, he needs to work harder to access those particular voters. But what he needs to do to access those voters threatens to alienate his original base of voters, which he also needs in order to win. They don’t want to vote for a guy that apologizes for “locker room talk.” That puts Trump in an impossible position that a talented, experienced candidate and team might be able to navigate out of – but, as discussed, Trump doesn’t have that.

4. He’s only been ahead for a fleeting moment in this election.

Take a quick look at polling aggregators. Only once – after the GOP Convention – has he ever been polling better than Hillary Clinton. And that peak was followed with his steepest decline of the last year. His polling has been over the place, but it hasn’t crossed Hillary Clinton’s horizon. And, at this point, it seems extremely unlikely that it will. Only the most charismatic, skilled politician could make up that structural polling deficit. He doesn’t have either.

These are all critical problems. Each of them would need to be rectified in order for him to be victorious in this election. No single debate performance, Clinton scandal, rally speech or publicity stunt can save him from these serious systemic problems.

Breathe easy – Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States.


Chris Henderson has been working on campaigns since he was 11 years old. He once successfully convinced Dave Cournoyer to shave his beard. Today, he is a Strategist at Calder Bateman Communications.

Categories
Alberta Politics

Sprawl Cabal of wealthy developers plot to take over Calgary City Council.

Calgary Developers Leaked Video
Screenshot of the leaked video

A video leaked to Global Calgary showing a large group of prominent wealthy developers plotting to stack Calgary City Council with sympathetic candidates is making waves in Alberta’s largest city. The video shows developer Cal Wenzel presenting a plan to defeat certain members of City Council who he perceives to be anti-urban sprawl – including Aldermen Druh Farrell and Richard Pootmans.

Unable to defeat popular Mayor Naheed Nenshi, this ‘Sprawl Cabal’ of wealthy developers are aiming to win over a majority of seats on City Council, which could give them the power to block any moves by Mayor Nenshi that they perceive to be against urban sprawl.

In the video, Mr. Wenzel claims that a large donation, of more than $1 million, made to Preston Manning‘s “Municipal Governance Project” training centre for civic election candidates (read the Manning Centre’s leaked talking points in response to the leaked video). The Manning Centre recently laid out their plans to train conservative-minded candidates in a bid to introduce a new brand of ideological conservative politics into Calgary’s next municipal election.

Because of municipal campaign finance laws limiting individual and corporate donations to a maximum $5,000, the presence of a special interest group like the Manning Centre in Calgary’s election appears to have given these wealthy developers a place to pour their money.

That this type of conversation happened is not a surprise. That is was recorded and leaked to the media is very surprising. The Sprawl Cabal was caught red-handed.

As former U.S. Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney learned last year when a leaked video showed him dismissing 47% of American voters, this group of developers have learned that even in the most secure locations, Little Brother is watching (I bet you never noticed that iPhone in his pocket).

(Thanks to Duncan Kinney for the ‘Sprawl Cabal’ inspiration)

Categories
Alberta Politics

Alberta Conservatives can relate to Tea Party “bozos eruptions.”

Tea Party
Angry Tea Party supporters rally against President Barack Obama.

Glued to my television last night, I, like probably millions of other Canadians, watched as the blue states and red states were tallied until President Barack Obama defeated former Governor Mitt Romney.

Last night and over the course of the American election campaign, I could not help but think of the similarities between the missed opportunities of the Republican Party in this election and Danielle Smith‘s Wildrose Party in Alberta’s recent provincial election.

Admittedly, the comparison is not perfect, but as someone who has immersed himself in Alberta politics and, for the past few months, American politics, I could not help but notice some similarities.

Both parties likely had opportunities for significant electoral gains, yet both suffered or were seen to have suffered electorally because of the extreme elements of their electoral coalitions.

Just as the “bozo eruptions” made by Reverends Allan Hunsperger and Ron Leech drove moderate Alberta voters away from Ms. Smith’s party earlier this year, the cruel and mean-spirited “rape” comments made by extreme right-wing Tea Party Republicans Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Murdock in Indiana appear to have driven moderate voters away from the Republican Party. As some pundits have suggested, the American bozo eruptions may have cost the Republicans the opportunity to win back states that they narrowly lost to the Democrats in 2006.

It was promising to see that moderate American voters rejected this type of politics. It was also promising to see American voters support ballot initiatives to legalize same-sex marriage in a handful of states, turning the tide back against years of electoral attacks on marriage equality. In Wisconsin, Democrat Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay Senator, which is made more exciting because her sexual orientation does not appear to have even be an issue during the election campaign.

For those of you who did not have the energy to stay awake into the early hours of the morning to listen to President Obama’s victory speech, you can watch it in the video below.

If only our political leaders could work up an ounce of President Obama’s charisma and powerful speaking skills, Canadian politics could be so much more inspiring.