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Dalton McGuinty campaign buttons are laid out at an Ontario Liberal campaign rally in Brampton on Oct. 2, 2011.Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Canadian Press

Unnoticed through the Ontario election is a staggering difference in the size of crowds the party leaders are generating.

Dalton McGuinty has routinely broken the 1,000 person figure at rallies, including at 7 a.m. the day after the debate. The campaign was greeted by more than 1,300 people on Sunday in Brampton.

In contrast, Tim Hudak's largest rally of the election was 300 people in the rural riding of Haldimand–Norfolk. In his home town of Fort Erie, just 200 came to see the Progressive Conservative Leader.

Campaign events by Andrea Horwath remained sparsely attended. The largest of the election seem to be in the 150 people range.

Why the huge disparity in motivation? Why are Liberals seemingly more enthusiastic than the supporters of the opposition parties? In the aftermath of a global recession, shouldn't Liberals have dampened hopes and PC and NDP events bursting at the seams?

For wisdom, let's turn to Jack Layton's recent letter to Canadians: "My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world."

Canadians responded to this message because it is true. Negativity is fundamentally off-putting.

For a person who is warm and engaging in person, Mr. Hudak's election campaign has been startlingly negative. From his attacks on "foreign workers" to a homophobic attack pamphlet, the tone of the PC campaign is unreservedly furious.

The NDP Leader similarly wears her anger on her sleeve. In a recent Star feature, Ms. Horwath was quoted revealing this: " Anger is a big motivator for me. It's part of why I do what I do. If I weren't angry, I'd be overcome by frustration."

While the opposition anger might get a hard core of partisans fired up, it leaves the rest of Ontario either demotivated from participating in politics or looking for solutions rather than complaints.

By making the strategic decision to run campaigns in opposition to the Liberal agenda, rather than define an agenda of their own, the opposition leaders both put themselves in the position of yin to the Liberal Leader's yang. They left Mr. McGuinty as the positive driving force of the current political agenda, and assumed the role of critics rather than reformers.

Much like Michael Ignatieff in the last federal campaign, who defined himself by not being Stephen Harper, the Ontario opposition parties both face the danger of failing to convert concern about the direction of government into action to choose a new government by voting for them.

Clearly, the positive positioning of the Liberals is being rewarded in large crowds, but crowds are more than just numbers at a rally. Large crowds signal three critical factors:

1. Liberals supporters are highly motivated. You don't get 1,000 people out to a rally at seven in the morning because people don't have anything else to do.

There used to be a saying: If you can't afford the theatre, go to the circus. If you can't afford the circus, go see a politician. In sleepier times when life on the farm or factory was achingly dull, a political rally was a big deal and huge crowds for torchlight parades were common place.

These days, people have hundreds of options on how to spend their most precious resource, their time.

Volunteerism is on the decline in Canada, at a rate of about 3 per cent a year, so seeing volunteer turnout in the thousands for a rally is very significant.

2. The Liberals are well organized. Motivation is good, but it doesn't convert to action without organization.

Large rallies are a good test of a campaign's ability to organize major one-day efforts. Getting a thousand people into a building at the right time, with identification of people, motivation to attend, clarity of place and time, buses, parking, fire code, permits, access for the disable and clear lines of sight for TV cameras is hundreds of man-hours of work.

It also replicates the one-day effort of getting the vote out. Which brings me to…

3. We can expect a motivated and organized Liberal get-out-the-vote effort on Thursday. The Liberals put a lot more effort into organization and GOTV in this election.

Their ability to get crowds to rallies is empirical evidence that they will be able to get voters to the polls, despite declining voter turnout. And people – motivated people who will knock on doors for 10 hours in the rain – is what a good GOTV is made of.

* * * * * * * * * *

The sad truth is that Ontario elections are beginning to look more like U.S. elections.

Turnout is likely to fall below 50 per cent this time, continuing the trend where fewer and fewer citizens exercise their right to vote. Neither of the opposition parties appears prepared to counter this.

On the heels of their strong federal showing, I had briefly expected the NDP to produce a significant new population of motivated partisans. But examining the federal NDP breakthrough in detail, you can see it was achieved exclusively through media appeals. The NDP won the lion's share of Quebec seats in spite of an organization on the ground there, and the same is true in much of Ontario.

Without the "Orange Crush" of earned and paid media support, NDP turnout efforts will be hampered by an ineffective ground game and a lack of resources. They simply do not have the people on the ground – as evidenced by their weak rally numbers and federal organizational challenges – to put forward an effective GOTV in more than a handful of ridings at any one time.

The Conservatives chose to use the air war to try to combat lowering turnout, with unceasing ads labeling Mr. McGuinty the "Tax Man." The PC campaign has been unrelentingly negative in its approach because it believes anger about Dalton McGuinty will get PC voters to the polls on Election Day.

However, it is not clear that this anger is actually the motivator the PCs believe it is. The small crowds at their events tend to make one think that the opposite may be true: If Tory voters are angry but disengaged from a positive alternative, they may simply lose faith in the entire process and stay home.

The PC GOTV machine is also highly dependent on remote voter contact efforts: phone canvassing, robo-calls, and voicemail drops. This is particularly the case in the GTA where their volunteer levels are lower than in rural parts of the province.

In contrast, the Liberals have proven they have an effective volunteer cadre that will knock on doors by hand. Political science shows that the single most effective way to get a person to vote is to have someone knock on their door.

In contrast, telephone mobilization is shown to have no impact what-so-ever. In fact, there is a significant and lively debate in the literature that telephone GOTV efforts – because of their high frequency and impersonal nature – may actually DEPRESS turnout by as much as 5 per cent and cause fewer of a candidates supporters to go to the polls.

The great thing about election campaigns is that they actually matter. The act of asking someone to vote to their face in person is the single most effective way to get someone to the polls.

With their mega-rallies, the Liberals have proven they have the people to get their vote out. The question is why the PCs and NDP ran campaigns that made it more difficult for them to do the same.

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