Electoral politics explained: "Are they for me? Are they like me?"

If you've ever wondered 'How the hell can anyone support that clown?' Well, there's an answer to that question.

Are they for me? Are they like me? Photo by Rob Curran on Unsplash.

If you’re baffled by Ontario premier Doug Ford’s popularity and success, you’re not alone. Ford has called an early, unnecessary, $189 million boondoggle of an election. In February. In February! And he could very well win a third-straight majority, a feat that hasn’t been accomplished by an Ontario premier since Leslie Frost managed it in 1959.

What do you say about that? It’s enough to make you go a little crazy. Perhaps enough to make you want to stay home on election day. I don’t advise either, but I understand both.

Last week I spoke with Canadian pollster and strategist Allan Gregg for a podcast that’ll be out soon. I’ve been following Gregg’s work since I was an excessively cool high school student, the sort who followed the work of strategists and pollsters. We were talking about the Ontario election and what draws voters to politicians. He said something to the effect that a voter’s support for a politician boils down to two questions: Are they for me? and Are they like me?

There you have it, electoral politics explained, elegantly and parsimoniously. Are they for me? Are they like me? This explanation captures the complex balance that voters strike in a democracy between rational and emotional connections to their leaders and to policies. I keep saying that people aren’t the rational, dispassionate, calculative machines that some like to think we are, that so much of political discourse since the Enlightenment has suggested we are. It’s flattering to think we are too smart to be duped, to be drawn in by charlatans. We aren’t. But we aren’t stupid, either. Not across the board; not as a rule, at least.

People may not be political experts, they may not be ideologically consistent, they may not even have solid policy preferences, but we do manage to find our way through the maze fairly well in the dark nonetheless. And eventually, we figure people out. We use mental shortcuts, known as heuristics, to try to approximate outcomes that serve us, calibrating over time, connecting feelings and rough senses to reality.

The like me/for me one is powerful, and Ford and his team are good at appealing to each. The way the Progressive Conservatives are running it, the Ontario election is about protection, about safety and security. That’s a powerful frame for a time when people are anxious and scared, staring down threats from Donald Trump’s tariffs to affordability struggles to the decline of our healthcare system. I won’t call it the “Daddy” election because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in intensive therapy, but there’s something to that, this old school strong father frame that comes up in politics quite often, and which psychologists like George Lakoff have written about extensively.

Sometimes shortcuts don’t serve us so well, though. It is rational to want to be protected and safe. It may be rational to want a politician who is — or at least seems to be — like you, since being like you serves as a proxy for being for you. But we can’t leap from these evaluations to conclude, without fail, that this same politician is good for you.

Recently, I’ve written about how Doug Ford’s character, judgment, and record ought to be politically disqualifying. I’m not alone here. Writing in The Toronto Star, Luke Savage did a great job at outlining specifically why Ford is as much a threat as Trump is, despite the fact that so many of us are laser-focused on the latter while giving the former a pass. That’s a short circuit we’ve got to repair.

Ford’s opponents need to take the for me/like me model seriously, just as they need to take seriously the fact that right now, people need and want security. Okay, people always need and want security, but these needs are particularly salient now, and they must be met. You can’t be like and for everyone, though, which means you need to draw lines. And traditional conceptions of like and for are going to be conditioned by centuries of specific constructions of images of strength and relatability, which tend to privilege some (white, male; older, wealthier) over others (everyone else). But those constructions are neither universal nor immutable, so we have something to work with — just consider Wab Kinew in Manitoba, if you have any doubt.

Electoral politics is the primary avenue through which policy change runs. You might like that, you might not like that, but it’s a fact. Opposition parties need to get better at electoral politics. That means asking themselves over and over again: Are we like voters? Are we for them? And, even more importantly, do they believe we are like them and for them? That way lies victory.

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But wait, there’s more!

I’ve got a new podcast out and I’m tremendously excited about it. I’ve called it The David Moscrop Show, in case I forget who’s meant to be hosting it. The first episode is out now. I speak with author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow. The pod is also available in audio-only format pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts. If it’s not available on your platform, let me know and I’ll try to get it there asap.

Thanks for listening!