Four lessons for Canadian progressives.

I’ve written a bunch of preambles about last night’s election results and everything feels flip or cliché. It simply sucks and as a woman, the results are deeply disturbing. My heart breaks for the half of Americans who woke up to a country they don’t understand or recognize. 

Being a Canadian watching US politics feels both deeply personal and disempowering. Emotionally, economically, and culturally, we won’t have rest for the next 4 years. The only thing we can do is focus on home. This article includes a few early lessons from the election for Canadian progressives. I’m sure there will be plenty more once we have the final data and time to understand all the crosswinds that brought us this result. 

Running an unpopular leader is a betrayal of your party and the voters you’re trying to fight for. 

Joe Biden rescued the Democratic Party in 2020 and crippled it in 2024. I assume Biden is a good person and I think he was a much better president than he’s credited with. But if the voters don’t see it, this information is irrelevant. As the candidate, his job is to win. It was clear well before this summer that he was not the Democrats’ strongest bet. He was probably the weakest. His resolve to stay cost the party months of critical organizing. 

Harris needed to throw Biden under the bus. He’s deeply unpopular and voters blame him for the poor economy, the top voting issue and Trump’s greatest strength. It should have been a campaign imperative to create distance. Instead, when asked on The View what she would have done differently than Biden, she said “There is not a thing that comes to mind. I've been a part of most of the decisions that have had [an] impact.”  This clip was then used in Trump ads to great effect. In trying to protect Joe Biden’s ego, she shot herself in the foot. 

Voters think the economy is fucked. We need to learn how to talk about it. 

Progressives need to stop treating the economy like a side dish. For most voters, it’s the entire meal. Especially today, this is the one thing voters want solved. The rest is gravy. Is that enough food metaphors? 

More than just the degree of focus it receives, the economy needs to be discussed in a way that means something to voters. Enough with uber consultant-ified “opportunity economy”-type language! We need to: 

• Validate how voters see and are experiencing the economy. If you’ve ever argued - but inflation is down! Shush. You’re actively harming persuasion. 

• Reflect that we share voters’ aspirations. This is not an extravagant wish list. People want to own a house. They want to be able to support their families. They eventually want to retire comfortably.

• Explain how we’ll make these realities possible, and why the other guys won’t. 

We can’t give up on men. 

One thing that still needs to be quantified is exactly how big the gender divide was in this election. In polls, I’ve seen anywhere from 15-20 pt gaps, and it was clear from the Harris campaign’s final messaging that they were going all in on women. In my last newsletter, I showed that young men plan to come out for Poilievre in astronomical numbers. We can’t win with these margins. Progressives need to figure out how to appeal to men. 

There are no shortcuts. Poilievre is not Trump. Canada is not the US. We’ll need to write our own story. 

I can imagine some Canadian progressives feeling a twisted bit of relief – “Well, at least we can now run against Trump!” For that to work, Poilievre and Trump would need to be viewed as similar. The work hasn’t been done to create that connection. In my September poll, I found 20% of Canadians think Poilievre and Trump are “extremely similar”, 23% think they are “somewhat similar”, 39% think they are “somewhat” or “totally different”, and 17% aren’t sure. Even among NDP and Liberal voters, just half think Trump and Poilievre are similar. I don’t have data on this, but I also assume that the issue set between Canada and the US is viewed as extremely different.  We’ll look desperate if we act like our races are the same.

In the coming weeks, there will be dozens! hundreds! of explainers of what happened and what went wrong. When it feels less Pollyanna, I’ll write about what the Harris campaign got right, notably Harris herself. For the most part, her performance was excellence personified. In all senses, I wish she had more time.