Federal parties don’t like to share their strategic thinking, but passing the midpoint of a campaign is a good opportunity to assess one strategy they cannot hide: where the leaders choose to campaign.
Some travel by the leaders is predictable. While there isn’t enough time to visit 338 ridings in the span of 40 days, there is time to drop in on all 10 provinces. It’s a bit of a courtesy call in places where a particular party has little chance of winning seats, but it’s necessary so as not to offend one entire province.
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Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer have taken care of that piece of business already — each has been to all 10 provinces in the first three weeks of the campaign.
Jagmeet Singh made a point of going to New Brunswick once the race had started, a province he had not managed to visit in the two years since he had become the NDP leader. That may say something about the New Democrats’ chances in New Brunswick.
A leader’s itinerary can tell you a lot about the party’s strengths and weaknesses and ultimate priorities, especially when it’s compressed into a 40-day sprint to all corners of the country.
Where do the parties think they can win? Where are they worried about losing seats? Getting that kind of intelligence isn’t easy on day one of the campaign. But by day 21, there’s a lot to consider just from where the leaders have travelled so far.
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Trudeau and the Liberals held events in more than 40 locations in the first half of the 2019 campaign, and 19 of those stops were in Ontario. Lo and behold, Scheer’s Conservative campaign also staged 19 events in Ontario alone.
It’s not just because Ontario has the most seats, it also has more competitive ridings than anywhere else in the country. After all, Alberta has a growing population too, but Scheer made it to only two campaign events there, while Trudeau got to just one in all of September. They both see the Alberta landscape in much the same way — it is Conservative blue almost from top to bottom. Spending a lot of days there is not time well invested for either of them.
There’s nothing new in that. I can recall that on one Stephen Harper campaign tour, one of the few visits he made to Alberta came on the last day before voting. He declared, “The West wants in.” He didn’t have to use valuable time on the election clock in Alberta to make that point, or to be quite certain of how the province would vote.
The leader does make a difference to a party’s chances in any riding he or she visits in the hopes of bumping up the party’s fortunes by a point or two. That bump may or may not last, but a local candidate does get a boost when the leader comes and brings attention to that riding.
Probably none of the leaders will make it to more than 100 campaign events before election day. There just isn’t enough time. That means dozens of ridings will not see a party leader.
So where do the leaders go? They go where they can make a difference.
Don’t expect Trudeau to spend much time campaigning atop a tractor in rural Alberta. Likewise, Scheer’s Conservatives don’t have much hope of popping champagne corks in downtown Toronto.
These ridings are critical to each party’s ultimate totals, but they are not where the battle on election night will be won or lost. The night will be won by the party that can win the “swing” ridings.
There are swing ridings that also involve the NDP, Greens and Bloc Quebecois in various parts of the country. But the ones that will likely swing the election will be the battlegrounds between the Liberals and Conservatives, the only two parties that have a realistic chance of forming the next government, according to polls.
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In the so-called 905 belt around Toronto, there are plenty of swing ridings. Brampton has five, Mississauga six. From Markham and Richmond Hill to Oakville and Burlington, riding after riding could go either red or blue.
Ipsos polling currently has the Conservatives with a three-point lead nationally, but shows the Liberals with a two-point advantage in Ontario. It’s all within the margin of error.
Trudeau opened one event recently with the words, “It’s great to be here in Brampton,” while Scheer began a campaign stopover just days later with, “How’s it going, Brampton? It’s such a great thrill to be here.”
There may be 338 ridings, but the two leaders have crisscrossed each other multiple times in this small part of the country because so many seats are in play between them.
And remember, a head-to-head, Liberal-versus-Conservative contest can be a double win — if Conservatives win Brampton West they will gain one seat, and the Liberals will lose one, just as when the Liberals took Brampton West from the Conservatives in 2015, who had won it from the Liberals in 2011.
WATCH BELOW: Tight race between Liberals, Conservatives with campaign at halfway point
Darrell Bricker of Ipsos says the Trudeau-Scheer overlap is no coincidence. “It suggests the race is very close in the place where the largest number of swing seats exists and that’s in the Greater Toronto Area.”
Bricker says a national campaign is really a series of regional campaigns, where leaders travel to influence the regional races. Just following where they’ve gone, Scheer and Trudeau have shown they’re executing this strategy from almost the same playbook: win the competitive ridings around Toronto, and win the election.
There is always intelligence to be gathered from the itineraries of party leaders. The campaigns often keep a lid on those plans until they must give some advance notice to travelling journalists. Of course, when they change the itinerary at the last minute, it is an “Ah-ah” moment for the reporters: “Why have they changed plans? What went wrong?”
ANALYSIS: For May and the Greens, opportunity in this election they’ve never had in any other
So what can we learn from Green Party Leader Elizabeth’s May’s travel so far? She has spent more time in B.C. than anywhere else. That’s where most seat projections have the Greens adding to their seat total. But it is also interesting to see that May made several stops in the Maritimes — the only other place other than B.C. where the Green Party is polling in double digits. Might we see May back in New Brunswick before the campaign is through?
Which brings us back to NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh. He has been to 19 events in Ontario and another 12 in B.C. Both provinces have had provincial NDP governments, and several incumbent MPs with campaigns to reinforce.
And yet Singh only attended four events in Quebec in the first 20 days, where the party won 16 seats in 2015, more than it won in any other province.
Bricker thinks it is telling that Singh is not spending much time in Quebec. “It suggests the NDP is not anticipating good results on Oct. 21, so they’re probably in a save-the-furniture mode as far as the campaign is concerned.”
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Singh may well travel more often to Quebec in October than he did in September — campaigns do re-balance things over the course of the full 40 days.
But it’s also the case that no leader can afford to spend time where it won’t make a difference. Every campaign must make brutally tough calls about where to go, and where to stop going. Riding along on leaders’ tours, one can watch a campaign begin to lay bare its objectives.
In the final days, the policies will all be public, and all that will be left is for the leader to blitz community after community, hoping one more stop will make a difference on election night.
Eric Sorensen is Senior National Affairs Correspondent for Global News.