David McLaughlin is a former Conservative Party chief of staff at the federal and provincial levels.
The hardest thing to do in any campaign is to change strategy in the midst of it. Yet each of the parties now has cause and pause to consider just such an action. Before it is too late.
When the dust has settled, every election campaign accumulates a received wisdom on what happened and why. Looking back, we assign value to "key moments" in the campaign – a debate, a gaffe, an ad or a policy – to make sense of it all.
This "outside in" perspective has its place, but real understanding actually comes the other way, from "inside out." It is decisions taken, or not taken, by the individual campaigns that explain a campaign's success.
This reality is haunting each of the parties' war rooms as they prepare to enter the critical post-Labour Day period of this unusually long election campaign.
The strategy developed before an election is called holds enormous sway after the election has been called. The product of hundreds of thousands of dollars of voter research and intensive internal discussions about moves and counter-moves, campaigns become extraordinarily invested in their own strategies. Given that it is the result that matters most, not how you got there, this is counterintuitive cognition at its best.
For all the vaunted nimbleness of war rooms, "stick to the strategy" is actually the first response when a campaign goes sluggish and momentum disappears. Amending all the hard thinking and discipline wrought in creating the strategy is simply anathema to top campaign cadres.
It is a strategy, to be sure, to take a chance on "chance," hoping that in the end your original analysis and computations work out (or, more likely, the other guy's do not). But it is a risky strategy and it is what now most severely confronts the Conservative campaign above all.
"No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy," is the pithy aphorism of famed Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke a century and a half ago. His logic was grounded not in the unpredictability of warfare, or election campaigns in this case, but in the limitations of human insight into knowing what the situation will be after meeting a hostile force.
After almost a month of campaigning, the limitations of the Conservative campaign's strategic insight are emerging. It is not that their campaign has irredeemably failed – they remain competitive and are getting an election on what they wanted, the economy. But the campaign is hollow inside about answering the most fundamental question of any election: Why should voters elect us?
Initially, the Conservatives faced the dilemma of figuring out their principal opponent in this highly regionalized election. But all parties face this quandary; it is not unique to the Conservatives.
The Conservatives actually need to confront what has become a more particular and pernicious threat to their campaign. It is not the Liberals or the NDP separately, it is the Liberals and the NDP together, at least in what they represent: change.
One month in, the Conservative campaign has yet to articulate a compelling reason for how it represents change to a restless and increasingly alert electorate.
"It is time to stay the course and stick to our plan," Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said on the day he called the election.
Nothing else refutes the need for change than a "stay the course" strategy. But when a majority of voters are seeking some semblance of change, this becomes a very risky bet.
"Stay the course" is fundamentally backward looking. It is rooted in a defence of the government's record – one that can be spiritedly made – but offers little to the future preoccupations of voters. It results in the same talking points as before, the same messaging, the same policies, the same presentation, the same voices saying the same thing.
Elections are unpredictable. Campaigns do count. But one essential remains: Every election is always about the future, not the past. It is what lies ahead that counts most to voters.
The Conservative campaign gambled on a past performance strategy to win re-election. An "inside out" rethink is required or afterwards they could well be on the outside looking in at someone else's government.