Fourth time’s the charm for perennial candidate Duguid

Opinion

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This article was published 20/10/2015 (3634 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By his own admission, Terry Duguid had become known in Manitoba political circles as “the guy who couldn’t win an election.” And with good reason.

Three previous times, Duguid lost bids to win a federal seat for the Liberals. In fact, it had been 23 years since he won his last election as a city councillor.

When he announced last year he would run a fourth time in a federal election, there were some people who thought he was foolish. Even crazy.

However, he finally triumphed Monday night, capturing Winnipeg South in landslide fashion with a whopping 27,500 votes, or 58 per cent of all votes cast. When it was clear his losing streak was over, he left his home in Whyte Ridge and headed down to his campaign office — a cavernous, abandoned Zellers store on Pembina Highway.

Sitting in that office Tuesday morning, Duguid said the reality of what he had done didn’t hit him until he saw the crush of people who had arrived to mark the occasion.

“All those people, everyone wanting a selfie, the pounding music… I couldn’t move, there were so many people crammed in here,” Duguid said as he surveyed his abandoned campaign office, a half-eaten celebratory cake the only evidence of the party the night before.

“You know, I always thought I had run good campaigns in the past, but we didn’t have much going for us nationally. We always left it all out on the field at the local level.

“This time, we got a really good national campaign, and look what happened.”

Duguid’s long-awaited triumph is proof winning any election requires a perfect storm of forces. You need a strong candidate running a strong campaign on behalf of a party with a strong leader and a strong national campaign. On top of all that, you need some luck.

Duguid’s 12 years in the political wilderness is a testament to these hard realities of elections.

Duguid’s first federal election in 2004 had been his closest opportunity to get elected to the House of Commons. In that election, he lost to Joy Smith by just 278 votes.

The 2004 election was a story about a Liberal government wracked by scandal, and its leader, Paul Martin, who was struggling to keep his long-serving government afloat.

In addition, the nomination process in Winnipeg was delayed to allow for star candidates such as Glen Murray, a former mayor, to pick his preferred seat. The delay proved fatal for candidates such as Duguid.

Duguid was ahead the entire night, and was declared a winner by some television prognosticators. But then the advance poll results came in, and Smith had totally dominated. It was just enough to give her the margin of victory.

Duguid ran again in 2006 against Smith, but the Liberals imploded nationally, and Smith soared to a 4,000-vote victory. After sitting out the snap election of 2008, Duguid faced more of the same misery in 2011, where a strong local campaign — this time in Winnipeg South — was undermined by a weak, Michael Ignatieff-led national campaign.

What changed this time around?

A new leader, Justin Trudeau, certainly helped. And as the Trudeau-led Liberals surged in opinion polls, Duguid finally found himself attached to a party that was, on election day, the presumptive front-runner.

But there was more.

The Liberals had, for the most part, been fighting 21st-century elections with 20th-century tactics and tools, and were losing badly. The 2015 election marked the first time, really, that the Liberal party featured a ground game that could match the Conservatives.

Under the direction of national campaign co-chair Katie Telford, Liberal candidates now had specific voter identification goals during the campaign. The central campaign hosted webinars nearly every night of the campaign to impart key strategic advice to local campaign managers. Local campaigns were constantly assessed and graded based on the number of “conversations” they were able to generate either through door-knocking or telephone banks.

Data was collected in each of those conversations and inserted via mobile applications into a central database. This information helped candidates identify and rank voters as committed or likely supporters, data that helped the Grits focus their Get Out the Vote (GOTV) efforts in ways previously not possible.

The first evidence of the Liberals’ new and more sophisticated approach to campaigning could be seen over the Thanksgiving weekend, when advanced polls were open. Duguid and other candidates reported they were ramped up to conduct an advance poll GOTV that had the intensity and reach of an election day effort. All that work paid off; Liberals reportedly outperformed the Tories on advance voter turnout, something that would have been impossible even four years ago.

This new and more sophisticated approach not only helped Duguid finally get over the top, it was also a factor in surprise Liberal victories in Winnipeg Centre, Kildonan-St. Paul and Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia-Headingley.

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In those ridings, the Liberals unseated two incumbents: New Democrat Pat Martin and Tory Steven Fletcher. In Kildonan-St. Paul, Liberal candidate Mary Ann Mihychuk, a former provincial NDP cabinet minister who made an ill-advised run for mayor in 2004, was able to engineer her own remarkable comeback by winning that seat over heavily favoured Tory Jim Bell.

In all those ridings, the Liberals showed up to campaign with more money, information, expertise and intensity than ever before.

“It’s not magic,” Duguid said.

“It’s just good, old-fashioned talking to people. But it’s making sure that you’re spending your time talking to the right people, the people who are open to your message. In the past, the Tories cleaned our clocks when it came to stuff like that. But those days are over.”

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca

Dan Lett
Columnist

Dan Lett is a columnist for the Free Press, providing opinion and commentary on politics in Winnipeg and beyond. Born and raised in Toronto, Dan joined the Free Press in 1986.  Read more about Dan.

Dan’s columns are built on facts and reactions, but offer his personal views through arguments and analysis. The Free Press’ editing team reviews Dan’s columns before they are posted online or published in print — part of the our tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.