How many memberships did Pierre Poilievre sell?

The second half of the Conservative Party leadership race is now underway. Midnight on June 4th represented the cut-off for new memberships sold for party members to be eligible to vote for the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

What’s the Pierre Poilievre news? Have Jean Charest and Patrick Brown merged campaigns yet? How’s Leslyn Lewis released her platform yet? Who is Roman Baber and what does he believe? Will Scott Aitchison end up endorsing anyone?

A source insider the Conservative Party told the CBC that the party expects to process over 600,000 new or renewed memberships sold by the leadership campaigns of Pierre Poilievre, Jean Charest, Patrick Brown, Leslyn Lewis, Roman Baber, and Scott Aitchison. A few of those membership will have been sold generally via the Conservative Party website during this period.

At $15 per membership, this means the party expects to rake in over $9,000,000 in revenue from this leadership race. This is a welcome winfall after spending tens of millions establishing abandoned branding exercises of Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole.

Campaigns will boast (and inflate) their numbers for various reasons. Some will try to establish themselves as the front-runner of the race and the candidate-to-beat. Psychologically, people like voting for the winner, so it helps to project this sort of confidence early-on. This will be Pierre Poilievre’s strategy as he’s been running a bit of a scorched-earth campaign with Jean Charest. In a ranked ballot contest, winning down-ballot support is critically important. That is, unless you are looking to win over 50% on the first ballot, making everyone’s second choice a moot point.

Poilievre’s campaign has been focused on exciting new members who have never before been active within a political party. His support of the trucker rally and position against vaccine mandates has attracted new people who have felt like they’ve been outside of the political process, while overtures to the cryptocurrency Bitcoin enthusiasts have inspired younger support. Pierre Poilievre’s principle campaign proxy Jenni Byrne has claimed that the campaign has sold 311,958 memberships. Byrne, perhaps knowing that campaigns inflate their numbers also called for transparency from the party on the process.

The softer side of Pierre. The candidate and his family. (via Pierre Poilievre)

Jean Charest for his part will be looking to rally the anybody-but-Pierre vote. For the former Quebec Premier, that number may be large or small, but will exist given Pierre is the perceived front-runner. Charest will be banking on Poilievre to be running at under 45% on the first ballot and will hope to gather second choice support. Boasting strong second-place numbers will rally support for this purpose behind Charest. At this time, Charest’s campaign has not released their numbers.

Jean Charest cracks a smile during a recent leadership debate (via Jean Charest)

For his part, former PC Party of Ontario leader and current Brampton mayor Patrick Brown boasted early on June 3rd, a total of 150,000 memberships were sold by his campaign with a day-long push later in the day to nudge this total higher. Brown has shown himself to be a formidable organizer in the past, shocking the Christine Elliott campaign during the 2015 PCPO leadership race – a campaign whose success was seen to be inevitable at the time. Brown has been selling memberships to new Canadian communities and hopes to diversify the party base by adding new membership to its rolls. We shall see how many of those new memberships from Brown were added versus renewed.

Patrick Brown and his wife Genevieve Gualtieri vote in Ontario’s 2022 election (via Patrick Brown)

Leslyn Lewis is the only candidate in the 2022 Conservative Party leadership race who ran in the previous contest versus Erin O’Toole. Lewis stunned the O’Toole and McKay campaigns with a stronger-than-expected showing on the first ballot, showing exceptional strength in the prairies. She has also positioned herself as the standard-bearer of the small but disproportionately active contingent of social conservatives in the party’s base – all other candidates declared themselves to be pro-choice on the issue of abortion. Lewis’ position against vaccine mandates suggest that her down-ballot support will eventually go to Poilievre. Her campaign has not yet released their numbers.

Leslyn Lewis and Peter MacKay (via Leslyn Lewis)

Roman has yet to release his numerals. Roman Baber – the former PC MPP who was kicked out of Doug Ford’s governing caucus in Ontario for standing against lockdowns – will likely be a long-shot for leadership as he is not very well-known in the federal party or in the rest of Canada. Rising to national prominance on a single issue has its own shelf-life as well. However, Baber has since taken strong conservative-pleasing stances against communism and against leftwing authority, so he may surprise if he has a good ground game to sell memberships.

Roman Baber campaigns in Vancouver, British Columbia. (via Roman Baber)

Finally, Scott Aitchison, has been congenial-as-a-brand during this leadership race. Hope is an emotion that spurs people to act politically, though fear and anger are stronger. And potential for change is the glue that holds it all together. Will Aitchison’s strategy help him? If he’s running #2 or #3 in this race, down-ballot support has the potential to crown him victorious. However, running at the end of the pack, as many suspect he is, may show a missed opportunity to grab more attention by taking more contentious takes on hot-button issues and personalities.

Scott Aitchison showing that Conservatives can be nice. (via Scott Aitchison)

But yet for the front-runners, this post-cutoff period of the leadership race will likely see more congenial behaviour. Such a shift in tone from Poilievre may indicate less confidence on the first ballot. Candidates will also downplay their more woolly and outlandish appeals to members as they’re not able to chase any new sign-ups. The rest of this game will be about projecting a perceived position in candidate rank, and gathering that all-important down-ballot support from others; appealing to voting blocs banked with other candidates becomes all-too-important.

An experiment with unintended results

The CBC wrapped up their Facebook initiative on Canada Day. The Great Canadian Wish certainly provided some unintended consequences, yet it teaches us some truths about social media and its participants.

As an aside, the next time an NDPer boasts that Tommy Douglas is The Greatest Canadian based on the shaky authority of a CBC populist initiative, show them this:

Poor CBC! The only wish that would have made them cringe harder would have been if “Privatize the CBC” had beaten out the rest.

The fate of the CBC isn’t as much of a divisive issue as that of abortion to be sure and that’s where we draw our first conclusion on why the public broadcaster got the results that it did.

Polarizing issues will drive people to mobilize. Frankly, it’s been an effective tool used by the Liberals during the latest rounds of electoral combat. Going nuclear on the Conservative Party meant referencing abortion during the last desperate days of the writ period.

Secondly, anti-abortion activists mobilized quickly and early. They also had the advantage of not representing the status quo; if abortions were illegal, you can bet that the pro-choice wish would have had more traction as it would have indicated a desire for change. The very concept of change is more mobilizing because it is natural to take the status quo for granted. Indeed, the issue of abortion is a real and emotional one for people on both sides of the debate.

CBC also touched on a particular rationale for the presence of the the highly contentious issue: forum. Since the topic of abortion has been one that hasn’t been polled or discussed in any real public sense for years (CBC illustrates this in its report above using Environics as an example), advocates against the practice felt that the Facebook group represented a “back-door” of sorts to bring it front-row-centre on a highly visible stage, the CBC. Are more Canadians on Facebook pro-life rather than pro-choice?

Not necessarily.

Since reproductive choice / access to abortion is the norm in this country, the pro-choice advocates have had the advantage (and in this contest, the disadvantage) of arguing from a comfortable, mainstream position. The most significant motivating factor for pro-choice advocates only came into action when it became apparent that their pro-life foes might actually pull off an upset. The pro-lifers were primarily motivated by the issue, while the pro-choicers were too comforted and slowed by the mainstream acceptance of their position, and were only motivated when that position came under threat. Where the pro-lifers sought to act on the issue, the pro-choicers found their strength in reacting. Since acting comes before reacting, acting had a head-start.

There are parallels, of course, to real life politicking that we can draw from the Facebook/CBC wish initiative. As, I’ve mentioned, emotional issues mobilize support and have been used by parties to get out the vote. The Liberal line was “we may have had some ethics problems in Quebec, but have you heard what the Conservatives want to do to your rights?” Since abortion isn’t actually an issue on the Conservative radar, Conservatives have difficulty appealing to emotion. “Rights” are compelling issues and the Conservatives would be wise to determine where they can successfully leverage their strengths in that domain (Rights for Afghani women and children is compelling). Status quo versus change is also a significant factor as the desire for latter can be a stronger motivator than protecting the former (for Conservatives and Canadians, economic freedom is a compelling right, however, it is the relative status quo). People take the status quo for granted and may only become motivated when a real threat is perceived. Often, these issues may come too late during an election for the reacting party.

Certainly, the CBC experiment had some unintended consequences (I’m sure that they’re thanking their lucky stars that they didn’t commit to making this an 8-part mini-series starring George Strombolopolous), however, I feel that it highlighted some very interesting characteristics of human nature, politics, and evolving social media networks. I wonder if other experiments that test human nature can be conceived and then realized on Facebook?

As an addendum, as a Conservative partisan I was somewhat worried that the prominence of abortion as an issue would have instigated a renewed negative focus on the Conservative Party regarding the topic. Kudos to the CBC for including the clip of Stephen Harper in this report on the CBC/Facebook wish:

UPDATE: Looks like the comments section has erupted into a pro-life vs. pro-choice debate. Consider that the post is actually about human behaviour as it relates to the motivating factors on social networks as a potential snapshot of the real-life world of political mobilization.