There are few things I will claim over John Tory. He's had a much more accomplished career than me. He was commissioner of the Canadian Football League; I just turn up at the games. He's running a provincial party; I'm writing a daily report on how he's doing. But if nothing else, let the record show that I'm quicker at judging when something is too ambitious to work.
It took Mr. Tory three-quarters of the campaign to realize that he was not going to be able to convince Ontarians of the merits of his religious schools plan. By contrast, it took me about half an hour to realize that I was not going to be able to incorporate every single aspect of the campaign into a daily report card.
My initial thinking was that the leaders would each be graded on a variety of factors. Who was running the best-staged events? Whose war room was responding quickest to opponents' attacks? Who was controlling the agenda? Which side was proving the most Internet-savvy, using online media to reach out to younger voters?
There were two problems with this approach. First, without being on each campaign bus all the time, it was impossible to track every movement by every leader – let alone what his staff was up to. More importantly, I wouldn't have been able to see the forest for the trees. Tracking all that minutiae would have meant that the report card bore little relation to how the election was actually being decided.
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The goal of a campaign is to win over average voters, not political nerds. And average voters don't sit around breathlessly awaiting the next press release or combing the Internet in search of YouTube videos poking fun at Dalton McGuinty. Instead, their impressions are formed mostly by brief clips on the evening news and newspaper headlines the next morning.
So to understand who's winning or losing the battles, that's what you have to keep your eye on – the things you'd look at if watching the campaign wasn't part of your job description. And then you have to ask yourself three key questions.
First, what message was each leader trying to get across that day to voters? Second, did he succeed in getting that message across? And third, was it the right message in the first place?
The reason Mr. McGuinty scored the best day-to-day, and has the highest overall mark looking back, is that for the most part voters saw what he wanted them to see. Owing both to self-discipline and to his campaign's careful staging of each event, he very rarely got thrown off message. That message – we've done a lot of good things, especially on education, and John Tory will mess them up – was exceedingly boring. But it was the right one under the circumstances, because the province had little will for major change, and stability is Mr. McGuinty's best selling point. Mr. Tory, by contrast, spent most of the campaign unable to control the message. The Progressive Conservative Leader spent his days trying to get Ontarians talking about the Liberals' health-care tax or their disdain for the parents of autistic children, but coverage of him focused almost exclusively on religious schools. As that issue swallowed him alive, nothing he did – interviews, public events, TV and radio ads – was enough to change the topic.
NDP Leader Howard Hampton fared slightly better than Mr. Tory, in that the coverage of him generally focused on whatever issue he was trying to get across that day. But in his case, the problem was that it wasn't the right message. With an unimaginative campaign, he wound up being marginalized – the one thing he absolutely needed to avoid.
To be clear, each leader was judged solely on whether he achieved his own goals, not in relative proportion to the other two. Otherwise, Mr. Hampton – whose party was sure to receive the lowest number of seats – would have been guaranteed the lowest grade. And however ambitious his belief that he would be able to make popular an unpopular policy, it was Mr. Tory who surely deserved that distinction.
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