Episode 1004: Charm offensives

Zain 0:01

This is a strategist episode 1004. My name is Zain Velji. With me as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter. Guys, one out of the three of us is drinking chocolate milk. Like a liter of it. Yeah,

Zain 0:14

liters of it. Carter, do you want to explain what's going on? How desperate have things gotten in Surrey? What's happening, my friend?

Carter 0:22

I'll tell you something. When you're an athlete, as I am, you use

Carter 0:25

use chocolate milk to refresh and reinvigorate your body we went for a ride yesterday and the chocolate milk I have

Carter 0:33

have no choice I have to drink it because you know that's what athletes do that's

Carter 0:36

that's what athletes do well

Corey 0:38

well and also your your mom gave it to you because you got an A plus on your math exam no

Carter 0:43

no Corey I'm an athlete uh let's not let's not diminish this by bringing intellectualism into it I mean I know the only way you got chocolate milk was from your brain brain some of us have the brain and the athletic package oh

Carter 0:55

there's only two people there's only two people on earth with the full package it's me and ken bosenkuhl that's

Carter 1:01

that's it we're the only two with the full package i

Corey 1:03

i don't want to talk about your package anymore can we move on zane is that you

Carter 1:06

you want to talk about ken bosenkuhl's package is

Carter 1:08

is that better lucerne

Zain 1:10

lucerne foremost or dairy milk what sort of milk folks are you guys or are you guys in the into in the lactate in the in the dairy free milk uh territory i'm all about that fair

Corey 1:21

fair life stuff you

Zain 1:22

you know okay i don't know what the fuck that is carter what what about you anything that that a mainstream person listens to this podcast would know about i've

Carter 1:31

i've got a dairy land here it's apparently a saputo inc brand so i inadvertently i appear to be supporting nicholas latifi and his f1 career so that turned out to be a mistake that's

Zain 1:42

that's good it's this is a great that's good that's good no this is a great start um what else we want to talk about uh cory we did episode one of the strategist um on our on our patreon only uh this was carter's first absence from

Zain 1:59

i mean carter uh you know no

Zain 2:02

no chocolate milk for missing last episode that's for sure uh how does it feel to to be back and how did it feel to to listen to an episode because you are the one that listens to all of them that did not have you in it i

Carter 2:14

it was missing some obviously important insight like

Zain 2:17

like what like what carter go ahead explain them uh-huh uh

Carter 2:22

i don't really remember the show that well if i'm honest i mean i was listening to it while doing other things um i think in fact it was sleeping i think i was sleeping but i listened to the whole show but i appreciated it i thought it was really good to

Corey 2:34

to be fair that is our

Zain 2:35

our sweet spot people who are asleep

Zain 2:36

um people are just just about to fall asleep you know what i'm going to do carter uh cory you can take a break for a second uh you'll you'll jump in in a moment here because carter i'm going to give you uh an eight second clock let's start our first segment our first segment steven carter in eight seconds carter i'm going to run through what we talked about last time i want to give you a fair shake on it i want to get you your your opportunity to give us your hot take in eight seconds or less okay you got eight seconds for each of these each of these topics that we covered last time Corey and I, we went through quite a bit.

Zain 3:08

Did we not, Corey? No, it was a good show. We went through a

Zain 3:11

topics. A shocking volume,

Corey 3:13

there wasn't this padding that you would normally

Zain 3:15

normally find in the show. Yeah, this dead weight, this sort of hot air, this sort of time-filling. Near dead weight. Near dead weight. Okay, yes, that's true. That's

Corey 3:26

life expectancy weight. Yeah,

Zain 3:27

Yeah, no, it's good. This is true. But trying to rejuvenate with the chocolate milk. Carter, here

Zain 3:31

here we go. First topic that Corey and I hit last time, question period. The media was going fucking nuts that Pierre Palliev and Justin Trudeau were having a showdown. Give me your hot take on question period as it relates to the showdown for both of these individuals. What do each of them need to know? What do each of them need to be aware of, Carter?

Carter 3:47

Totally agree with Corey Hogan. There's never been a clip come out of question period that made any difference. Zane, you were completely right. Tom Mulcair would have been prime minister if question period mattered.

Zain 3:56

Nicely done, Carter. Holy shit, he did listen

Corey 3:58

listen to the episode.

Zain 3:59

He did listen to it. Yeah, I mean, he clearly didn't put him to sleep. Wait, Carter, Garnet

Zain 4:03

Garnet Genuis versus Dale Smith on the media question. So Dale Smith tweeting out this thing. He says it's a joke. He's not going to apologize. This is a journalist saying, you know, how dare Garnet Genuis subject us. This is the MP from Sherwood Park. Subject us to a crazy question trying to quote Bohemian Rhapsody in like a sing-songy way. Carter, your take on this, especially now with the added layers to the story around having Dale Smith move from the gallery.

Carter 4:32

i think that it's stupid that he had to move from the gallery i think that genius is a fucking idiot and uh he was trying to overreach dale pointed it out probably shouldn't have included that we shoot uh lame horses but that was a lame horse that deserved to be shot that shouldn't have been on public it shouldn't have been on the public airways at all and uh the fact it was going to be recorded forever and answered uh makes genius or genius look like an absolute absolute moron. Moving on.

Corey 5:00

Carter. I think our application to the press

Corey 5:02

press gallery is going to be rejected now.

Zain 5:04

Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, this is an absolute side note. We are in the market for law firms. If

Zain 5:11

If law firms want to sponsor this podcast and

Zain 5:14

even advise us on borderline

Zain 5:16

borderline related issues. We talked about the NDP, Carter.

Zain 5:21

Carter. Jagmeet Singh is in this interesting position. His polling seems to be where

Zain 5:26

where it usually is for the NDP, the mid-20s, at least I should say usually in the last couple of years. But there's calls that Pierre Polyev is stealing his young voters, his youth voters, that this is going to be a train wreck heading into the next election. Do the NDP federally need a new leader? Stephen Carter, we discussed that. What is your hot take?

Carter 5:43

They don't need a new leader. He's as ineffective now as he's going to be in the future. This is just the way he is. um they didn't think they needed a new leader uh before pierre and they don't need one now they're just going to continue to be uh you

Carter 5:57

you know the guy who the guys who hold justin trudeau to account for a dental plan two

Zain 6:02

two more topics and i'm going to dovetail the last one into our next segment because i want to talk about a bit more but but carter danielle smith let's talk about her we'll talk about her a bit later in the show as well two new endorsements mike ellis uh alongside Alongside Angela Pitt, overrated, underrated. We were kind of talking about what these endorsements meant at this period in time. Is this forward momentum? Is this a byproduct of that phone call strategy that you were suggesting about talking to those that are on the fence or have not supported you? What do you think about Daniel Smith bringing two more folks from the caucus, not her caucus just yet, but on side?

Carter 6:38

Angela Pitt just can't keep her crazy inside. And Mike Ellis is looking for halfway decent cabinet position.

Zain 6:46

making nothing more of it nope

Zain 6:47

nope that's it nicely

Zain 6:49

nicely done carter look at that he i think for the most part cory he's stuck to the eight seconds i don't know what do you think anything you want to retort on before we move on to our next segment about jason kenny because yes we're going to

Zain 6:59

talk about jason kenny i

Corey 7:00

i i want to know where this efficiency is in the other 1003 episodes we've done this

Zain 7:06

this is true maybe it's just because

Carter 7:07

because we haven't usually pay extra for me but they didn't so they already already paid extra for you two and i feel like it was bad enough don't

Zain 7:13

don't worry bloated bloated carter can make an appearance again because we're moving on to our first segment our first segment where was this guy yes

Zain 7:22

yes guys i want to talk about jason kenney so carter cory and i in our last episode on the patreon episode we talked about jason kenney what is his

Corey 7:28

his plan we talked about the alberta's calling campaign

Zain 7:31

campaign that is going on in uh in toronto and vancouver cory with his unique insights working in public affairs and government communications, deconstructed the campaign a bit, talked about what he would have done differently. I don't want to relitigate all that. People can find that on the Patreon episode to talk about the bones of that campaign and what it's trying to do. What I do want to talk about a bit more is

Zain 7:52

is Jason Kenney, Carter, because Kenney gave two speeches this weekend, one at the Canada Strong and Free Conference. We'll talk about that one uh less but second and and firstly i believe it was auma that he spoke at as well where he gave a keynote address and in that keynote address packaged um someone on twitter's kind of put together some of the comedic stylings of jason kenny cory do we have that clip that we can we can play the

SPEAKER_01 8:19

the single largest film production in canadian history the hbo zombie movie the last of us fill

SPEAKER_01 8:26

fill in your jokes right there I

SPEAKER_01 8:29

don't know I they still won't let me on I've been trying to get a walk on but

SPEAKER_01 8:35

but as they say I guess I'm proof that politics really is showbiz for ugly people this

SPEAKER_01 8:40

this is in Vancouver as well come

SPEAKER_01 8:43

come come to Alberta to see something you've never seen before an affordable detached home

SPEAKER_01 8:53

he said premier i know it looks pretty bleak for you albertans right now but let me tell you um

SPEAKER_01 8:59

um sorry justin i'll call back later um

SPEAKER_01 9:16

got nothing left to lose

SPEAKER_01 9:24

peter this is clearly not a ucp caucus meeting

Zain 9:33

subjected you to a minute 20 of jason kennedy do you think that would ever happen on this podcast guys seriously i i'm

Carter 9:40

i'm very upset yeah

Zain 9:42

yeah you should be but there's a reason why i did that because the commentary from that clip I think is really interesting and allows us to maybe have a conversation on strategy. Because I'm not going to say this is an overwhelming sentiment, but there is certainly a sentiment from a lot of the progressive, maybe even centrist types. Where was this guy? Where was this comedic powerhouse? Where was this charm offensive Jason Kenney? Where was this self-deprecating person? And part of me wants to pull my hair out, But it's not my job on this podcast to do that. Carter, it's your job. And we've been seeing the outcome of that over the years. So Carter, talk to me about this. Is that a valid sort of sentiment? Where was this guy? Or is that not even possible that this version of Jason Kenney could not have been presented to the public? Or is this also something that we've talked about in the past where people are viewing this frame through how they see him in the moment versus how they saw him in the past and the emotional resonance to that. Start us off here, because I think there's a strategy discussion to fully analyze, could he have been this person and quote-unquote won over people with the personality that we saw on stage here? Carter?

Carter 10:53

You know, I thought political audiences were pretty hard up having to listen to the three of us to find their comedy fixes. That was pathetic comedy. That was just not even good comedy. So the fact that we're all looking at this and saying, oh my goodness, isn't he ever so funny and charming? First of all, he's always been charming. We've talked about that, Corey and I, I don't know how many times, especially in the one-on-ones. He has been a guy that we've watched win over room after room after room using similar techniques to what he had yesterday or the other day. This is not new for Jason Kenney. What is new is what he said in his speech. He has nothing left to lose. He can say whatever he wants. The joke about Justin probably would have played in any room. him. The UCP caucus probably wasn't going to work, right? So now that we know that it's dysfunctional, it had some meat on that particular bone. But the truth of the matter is this Jason Kenney was there the whole time. Corey said something interesting in a couple of podcasts ago. We were talking about Justin Trudeau and the way he was singing Bohemian Rhapsody. If you don't like someone, the way they hold their knife and fork will make you crazy. This is what happens when there's no longer any stakes as to whether or not you like or don't like this guy. He no longer has the same power over us, so it doesn't matter if we like him. And suddenly we're open again to the idea of liking him. When someone announces they're going to retire, their popularity jumps. All the polling right now that's coming out on Jason Kenney shows his popularity jumping. This guy was there the whole time, Corey and I. And even you, Zane, even you have pointed out that this guy can be very, very charming when he wants to be.

Zain 12:39

Corey, talk to me about this, and I'll maybe ask a more pointed question stemming from Carter's comments here. Could Jason Kenney have run his entire tenure as if he had nothing to lose?

Corey 12:49

No, because he had things to lose. I mean, that's the simple answer.

Corey 12:54

But I just want to plus one everything Carter said. Absolutely fucking nailed it.

Corey 12:59

The people who say, where has this guy been? I, you know, I worked for the guy for a year. I'll tell you, my first reaction was, have you never seen a Jason Kenney speech? This is every Jason Kenney speech. You know, the jokiness, the self-depreciating, kind of the quirkiest sides, seeming a little bit more cerebral, a little bit more erudite than that sort of get-or-done attitude that was in the view in elections. This is who the guy is. But to Carter's point, there were obviously certain jokes that were just off-limits. And Jason Kenney is a smart enough man to know not to fall into what I would call the John Crosby trap. And this is going to be a deep poll for some of our audience who say under the

Zain 13:37

age of 40. But do it, do it, do it,

Zain 13:38

it, do it though,

Corey 13:39

But Crosby was a conservative MP who, you know, smart, witty, Newfoundland fellow, lots of charm, could never stop himself from saying the funny thing, even if it was absolutely self-destructive, right?

Corey 13:52

right? And you had these blow ups where he would say things like, oh, pass the tequila, Sheila. And, you know, in the House of Commons, and it didn't go over well. People didn't

Corey 14:04

Jason Kenney doesn't suffer from that disease. He knows when to say, oh, maybe it's funny, but my job isn't to be funny. My job is to be the premier of this province. My job is to try to keep my caucus together as its leader of this party.

Corey 14:16

But this is that guy. And you know, Zane, you

Corey 14:20

you and I were at an event

Corey 14:24

event for the Alberta Real Estate Association. I was on a panel, you were on a panel, Daniel Smith was on the same panel as me. And you, me and Daniel Smith were in the back of the room, sitting right next to each other, talking to each other, as Jason Kenney gave a speech about the future of Alberta and what was going well. And, and many of the same sort of beats much of the same sort of energy. This is who the guy is. And I think at the time you and I were saying, boy,

Corey 14:53

boy, if this guy gets a chance to get out there again, you know that he's got a, he's got a shooter's chance.

Corey 14:59

Now, obviously didn't work out for him. But, but this

Corey 15:03

this is Jason Kenney. And Carter has absolutely nailed it. There are no longer stakes for us as voters. And so people are willing to like the guy again. And they

Corey 15:12

were not willing to like the guy as long as they thought even sort of giving him credit for a joke or something might

Corey 15:19

might prop him up in some way. And they

Corey 15:21

they were not willing to prop up his politics in any way.

Zain 15:24

Carter, before I ask you whether this is deliberate, whether this is part of the rehabilitation, whether this is part of the legacy, I'll get to all of that. Talk to me about if there is a lesson here for Kenny, because from what I'm understanding and collecting from what you guys are saying, You're saying this is a byproduct of voters now giving him a chance. But

Zain 15:42

But can he have done anything as related to the behaviors we saw in this clip that I subjected you both to and the audience by extension? But could he have done anything like this during his tenure? Was there a lesson for him to learn?

Zain 15:55

Maybe retrospectively about how he should have behaved, how he should have talked, his humanizing qualities. You guys are saying they were there the whole time. Or

Zain 16:02

Or is this simply, simply just

Zain 16:05

just voters giving him a chance because there's no stakes? to them liking him at this point.

Carter 16:11

Well, it's interesting because I'm not sure that we've written the full dissection on how Kenny fell apart. If I was to offer like a 20-second review, he falls apart by overreaching, right? He's Icarus. He's flown too close to the sun by bringing together these

Carter 16:29

these two halves of the conservative movement. These

Carter 16:32

These two halves of the conservative movement don't work very well in in this particular province. They're different cousins, if you will. They don't share the same values, even though they share the same title. So

Carter 16:45

So he brings them all together, gets them all into the same tent, and then finds out through crisis that it's nearly impossible to keep them all together. It might have been possible to keep them together if the crisis had only been financial. As soon as you add a social crisis on top of the financial crisis that he was facing, he

Carter 17:02

was really in over his head and it wouldn't have mattered how

Carter 17:07

how charming he had been the speeches that he made how authentic uh to pull back another word that we've been using a lot on the podcast yeah yeah like

Zain 17:14

like our like our continuous kind of coverage

Zain 17:17

on authenticity yeah yeah it

Carter 17:18

it wouldn't have mattered because at the end of the day he was going to say something that was going to piss off half his caucus and ultimately that was his undoing um he had to say things that would piss off a lot of his caucus mates.

Carter 17:31

That's a problem for him. And I think that that's ultimately what his failing was. How he would have fared had he just won the PC leadership and resurrected that party, we'll never know. We'll never know if he'd taken over the leadership and left or just left Brian Jean hanging the ineffective leader that he is. And I think we've seen recently, and I'm not I'm not sure you're going to bring up how bad Brian Jean is right now. But if

Carter 17:56

if he just left Brian Jean withering, holding on to the small end of the stick with the Wild Roads Caucus, I think Jason Kenney governs for quite a while, because he would have had much more ability to be himself and to speak the truth that I think he wanted to speak about COVID and our response to it.

Zain 18:19

Corey, the feedback is minimal. It's anecdotal. But seeing

Zain 18:23

seeing where people, or at least some folks, are at with this commentary has kind of tweaked the question I asked Carter. Were there lessons for Kenny to be learned and for other politicians to be learned around humor,

Zain 18:33

humor, charisma, charm, how you apply it? Or is this simply, as you guys have iterated, just a matter of no stakes for Jason Kenney, so we have license to like him?

Corey 18:43

No, I think there are lessons here. This is, in some ways, this is the Bullworth effect, right? right? You remember that sequel

Corey 18:52

sequel to Dave where there was the politician

Corey 18:58

that his life was over. So he hired a hitman to kill himself and then he didn't give a damn. And he just went out on the campaign trail and said whatever he wanted and became very,

Corey 19:07

very, very popular. It's a trope

Corey 19:09

in coverage because we all sort of think that, boy, wouldn't it be refreshing just to have somebody who just lets it all hang out there sure sure um yeah

Corey 19:18

yeah i think that that's okay in small doses but i also think that that personality has been tried many times i mean jesus that's donald trump he just

Corey 19:27

it all hang out there um and there's a serious downside to that as well you know at the end of the day our politicians are also required to be states people and you can't have them just setting tiny little fires everywhere and sometimes discretion is the the better part of valor. So there has got to be a calibration between sincerity and candor on one side and professionalism on the other. And that's a line that politicians have to struggle with a lot of the time.

Corey 19:55

There are lessons to be learned though. Carter paints an interesting parallel universe that I just want to dip into for just a moment, which is Jason Kenney becomes leader of

Corey 20:04

of the PCs, but does not try to push a merger with the Wildrose. Now, on the downside, PCs were the third party. They were not the official opposition. So that would

Corey 20:15

would have given kind of Brian Jean initially a bit of a head start, I think. But there is a universe where it's not dissimilar to 2015, where the NDP didn't need to merge with the Liberals, the Alberta Liberal Party. They didn't need to merge with the Alberta Greens. They just became the only competent player in that space. And as my friend Justin Archer says, they were the only ones dressed when the bus came.

Corey 20:38

And it's possible that Jason Kenney could have been the only conservative option dressed when the bus came. And instead of saying, we all got to be together in one team, he could have pitched, we've all got to vote for me, this conservative option. And maybe he could have done something. It's hard to say. Certainly, they would have been dealing with some pretty aggressive vote splits in the rural areas, I think. That would be unavoidable.

Zain 20:59

Carter, can we dip back into our, like I mentioned earlier, our ongoing coverage of authenticity for a second? And can we talk about these

Zain 21:08

these X factor things like charm, charisma?

Zain 21:12

Like, are they accelerants? Are they glue to

Zain 21:15

keep you together, to keep a group together? How do you kind of, when you're advising a candidate that

Zain 21:21

that has got some of that in spades, and you know, like him or not, Jason Kenney clearly does. This was a manifestation and an illustration of that, the clip we just saw.

Zain 21:30

How do you kind of, what are your rules on charisma and charm? Because we talk about it as a charm offensive, which almost implies that you can use it sparingly. Is that correct? Is that true? How do you kind of contour these things and these

Zain 21:42

these things that are so nebulous to begin with?

Carter 21:46

you're asking me um i'm asking you yeah

Carter 21:50

it's hard to articulate zane how i maintain my charm and uh how

Carter 21:56

i keep it for everybody all the time no the charm charm is interesting because charm you know charm

Carter 22:04

can piss off 50 of the people that you meet when you're a politician you don't need to have charm

Carter 22:09

charm that works with everybody that's the beauty of donald trump well one

Zain 22:13

one would argue it's also wildly subjective, right?

Zain 22:16

right? It's not an objective qualifier. I mean, there are some politicians universally people would say, yes, very charming, like them or not. But I understand that it's also a subjective

Carter 22:27

And very much culturally specific. I mean, you've got Donald Trump in the US, his charm, there was a charm to Brian Mulroney, there was a charm to Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I mean, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was a sex symbol, much like his his son has become a sex symbol. Um, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau was an ugly, ugly man and nonetheless became a sex symbol. Why is the, you know, how does charm work? We're not really entirely sure, but, um, charm is somewhat in the eye of the person who is being charmed. Uh, if they're being, if, if, if they see something that they like, and I think that it can be there all the time. Boris Johnson had that kind of boyish

Carter 23:05

boyish charm, but no, I certainly couldn't understand, but it was there. And I think it needs to be there all the time.

Carter 23:12

And when you start to lose it, when you become the person that people just simply don't like, then it doesn't matter how charming you try to be. The mere fact that you're trying to be charming will be the thing that pisses people off, which is why personally I've given up on it.

Zain 23:27

Have you ever had to dial a candidate back on the charm offensive or on using charisma as a crutch, for

Zain 23:33

for example like i can see you haven't you've actually told him to hit the gas on it is that fair to

Carter 23:39

to say because it's there or it's not the very definition of authentic is someone who can be charming when they walk into the room now i think that there's different types of charming some candidates i've worked with one-on-one just it's impossible not to be drawn to their to their charisma to their individual charisma one-on-one sometimes it's the small group candidate the The candidate that can walk into the small group and just, wow, everybody, hold the room. Like, Ginny Sims right now is an excellent small group candidate, charmer. But

Carter 24:08

But then there's the room, right? When you walk into the room and you've got 5,000 people watching you, that charmer. That candidate's hard to find, Zane, the one who possesses all three of those things. I think that Corey and I have seen individuals that possess one or two of those, but it's very hard to see someone who's got all three.

Zain 24:27

Corey, can I come to you in one second? I know you want to get in on this, but I have a follow-up for Carter specifically.

Zain 24:31

Carter, from your decision-making as an active campaigner,

Zain 24:35

campaigner, campaign manager, strategist, when you're choosing to work with a candidate, how

Zain 24:39

how big of a factor is this for you?

Zain 24:42

The X-factor, charm, charisma, stadium tour-like or group-like or one-to-one-like, do you have a preference between one of those three lanes? Do you look for it? Is it a non-starter if they don't have any of it in your eye? Tell me your decision-making criteria as it relates to, I assume, viability, but

Zain 25:00

but where charm and charisma kind of play a role in that.

Carter 25:03

The second group is the most important. The ability to walk in and wow a group of 8 to 20 people.

Carter 25:08

If everybody in that group of 8 to 20— You

Zain 25:11

that over stadium tour-style charisma, like over Keith Urban-style, you know, fill a stadium, and I could— Keith Urban was your poll there?

Carter 25:19

unbelievable. I think we're

Carter 25:21

we're both disappointed. It's kind of stadium country.

Carter 25:21

I'm going to stadium country, Corey.

Zain 25:23

Stadium country. that didn't

Carter 25:25

didn't really feel authentic thing but anyways i

Zain 25:28

i like heath urban okay

Zain 25:31

don't like i don't like most of it but

Carter 25:33

but there are tricks i can teach you to do a stadium right

Carter 25:35

right there are tricks that we can teach in the stadium uh like the the it's

Carter 25:42

it's much harder i think to teach someone to be authentic in small groups it is much easier to get them to be authentic. You can give them tips and tricks to be authentic to the larger group. And I would argue that some of what Jason Kenney did was tips and tricks. It's

Carter 26:00

It's the stuff that he does in the small groups, the stuff that wowed Corey

Carter 26:04

Corey Hogan, right? Because Corey Hogan, when he was working there, he'd worked with Notley. I'm not sure, Corey, if I'm speaking for you, but you

Carter 26:11

you weren't walking into the room thinking, God, this guy's going to impress me. I can feel it. You're

Carter 26:16

You're going in skeptical and you leave entranced

Carter 26:19

entranced because that's the that's the way the guy yeah

Corey 26:22

that's right i mean you've just created fiction but that's what i've done this cory

Corey 26:27

cory get in on this we're talking charm charisma

Corey 26:29

since we're talking about how i feel about things why don't i hop in and tell you how i felt about things hey

Zain 26:35

hey cory are you around do you want to get in on this or what like uh yeah

Corey 26:39

don't know why you haven't been on it thus far i don't know why all

Zain 26:41

all right well Well,

Corey 26:42

here's the thing. I am ultimately fairly cynical after a lifetime in government and politics,

Corey 26:48

and it's not that easy for me to be sort of wowed by the fundamentals in politics. The ability to just talk to somebody in

Corey 26:58

in a way that sounds semi-coherent, that's a baseline skill I would expect of anybody who gets into the Premier's chair. share. I would say that both Rachel Notley and Jason Kenney are excellent examples of very good leaders in the kind of the small area that Stephen Carter is talking about. Like

Zain 27:14

Like the group size sort

Zain 27:16

element. Both can bring

Corey 27:16

bring significant amounts of charm. I can think about individual moments for both of them where I'm like, holy cow. You get why they're doing what they're doing at certain moments. And they're small moments, but they're such telling moments. I can remember this one time Rachel Rachel Notley was doing the tour of the government offices around Christmas and she came to my department. She's talking to the people who are on the floor and just everyone sort of scrums around to hear the premier talk. And I

Corey 27:42

I mean, holy crap, it was extemporaneous and it was five minutes and it was charming as hell. And like everyone in the audience was just sort of beaming afterwards. And then I can think of moments where Jason Kenney is doing that initial tour of a public service. He was like, oh, here's the new guy. What's this going to mean? And charming

Corey 28:00

charming as hell. I mean, they just have like this extra gear that a lot of politicians don't. And I do agree with Stephen that that ability to talk to small groups is probably the more important one. You know, not the one-on-one because you just you can't do the volume you need in politics at one-on-one and

Corey 28:17

and not the stadium because that

Zain 28:19

that is actually that. No, that's a produced pack. That's a produced product, though. That's

Corey 28:23

That's something that you can create with people around you in a way you simply cannot fake in small group meetings. So that's

Zain 28:29

that's a great point. And then all of us have been involved in those scenarios as well. So that's actually a really good point that often what we see from a stage is manicured way more than what someone has to deliver multiple rounds of 45 minutes at a time with a group of a dozen people. Well,

Corey 28:45

And when you're talking to those groups of people, you've got to, if you've met them before, you've got to remember their concerns from before.

Corey 28:51

There is a, like something I tell in presentation training a lot is like a large group is a stranger to everybody, including itself. self you

Corey 28:59

you do not know who in the group that things might be applying to so you can make a statement from the the podium and you can say something like hey uh you know i know there are people out there who might be thinking what's going on with this right well if you're in a group of six people the six people might look at you and say no no one's thinking that you know small group has a higher level of difficulty uh because you can't sort of just live in kind of the ambiguity as to what does the audience another participant in this thing the audience is right in front of you the audience can tell you what they think so that is a harder group to deal with yeah

Zain 29:38

that's really interesting and you know going back to i know carter we brought this up in the past around using things like theater and stand-up comedy where we talk about you know the biggest skill or the biggest compliment one could be paid is if they're playing a stadium or an arena And it makes it feel like the room is one-tenth the size, that it is an intimate group. And I feel like that similarity also applies to politics, right? Where even if you're in a group of 12, the goal is to make people feel like they're one-on-one and that everyone, to Corey's point with that Rachel Notley example, everyone was beaming. Corey, I want to give you a little bit more space. Any final thoughts on here before we wrap up? Because I just really wanted to use this Kenny clip as a jumping off point to talk about charisma, political humor, and frankly, the practicality of could Kenny have been this guy? Anything final to add before we move on?

Corey 30:25

Yeah. One of the other things that I think just sort of needs to be thrown out there, and maybe we should have at the start, is that part of the reason why people are saying, wow, where was this Jason Kenny, is because the media is not generally in the business of clipping the jokes from a political speech. Yeah, exactly.

Corey 30:40

They clip the comments, you know, the bottom line,

Zain 30:43

line, the meat and potatoes,

Corey 30:44

point. And that's what gets out there. So you don't always see that. But every single political speech is full of jokes. Every single political speech. There are very few politicians, you know, not every politician does the jokes well, but there is almost always kind of the icebreaker at the start and then the turn where you get more serious and then it loosens back up again at the end there. there.

Corey 31:06

One of the people I always think of when I think about political jokes is Kent Hare, a candidate that Stephen, you've worked for in

Corey 31:14

His speeches would be 50% jokes before he got to the content. And I bet you we could both do some of those jokes from memory. And then after he made his first joke in any speech, he'd say, oh, yeah, I hope you like that. But you know what the problem with political jokes is? Sometimes they get elected. And then the other joke comes.

Corey 31:35

you're that's a knowing laugh i know you've heard of me i've

Carter 31:38

i've heard that i don't know how many times it's unbelievable you just did that joke that's the best yeah

Corey 31:44

yeah um comedy is part of politics because it's ultimately a performance art partner

Zain 31:51

partner i have to now okay i was going to end on here but i have to follow up on cory's thing how

Zain 31:55

important is it if your candidate is funny how important is Is it to Corey's point where they don't clip the jokes that that penetration of being known as funny is how important is it to be known as funny? Is that a gender thing from your perspective? I'm just kind of curious now, just thinking about it out loud with with the three of you or the two of us, three of us, two of you. How important is it if you have that tool in your tool belt to be known for having that tool?

Carter 32:25

Well, let's run through my three types of charisma. month if

Carter 32:28

if you're funny on one-on-one and you share that kind of intimate moment with someone where you make them laugh they're going to remember you um

Carter 32:35

um you're you're sharing something back and forth between between you and someone else and you're funny it's just a joke through the two of you shared and it's something it's a moment and it is an emotional connection laughter is emotional um so it's good the second group is if you have a small group of people and you and you tell them a joke that just again just the 20 of you get to share um you know it's It's personal. Maybe you made it look like you just thought of it on the spot, right? That's the first time you've ever uttered that phrase that made them all laugh and feel good about themselves. Again, what a wonderful way to bring you into the group, you know, to a self-deprecating comment suddenly changes the way that the group feels about you. And then if you can get into that big stadium show, you're

Carter 33:21

you're Keith Urban and

Carter 33:23

you throw out some jokes. I mean, one of the reasons that i think okay

Zain 33:29

yeah we need to we need to we need to we need to keep the urban i feel like this is beetlejuice

Corey 33:35

beetlejuice guys we say keith urban three times and he's going to be a running joke on this show for the next three years but

Carter 33:42

i think it's i think that one of the reasons that adele i mean adele is an amazing performer but she's also hilarious if you've ever seen one of her shows she's she's she brings you in and the 25 000 people who were sitting in or show all feel like they're getting a personal experience because they get to laugh i mean the three of us really understand the value of laughs i mean zane and i because we make other people laugh and cory because he doesn't um pretty

Zain 34:09

pretty good carter uh

Zain 34:09

uh yeah also funny very funny john mary cory anything to add on humor before we end this off yeah

Corey 34:15

apparently uh funniest politician of the 90s in the united states you want to take a guess carter take a guess who do you think in the 1990s

Corey 34:22

in the 1990s uh

Corey 34:23

this is like this is common republicans democrats they across the board like they would they would acknowledge this funniest guy uh

Carter 34:31

uh perhaps profile bob

Corey 34:39

and i guess this is what i sort of want to wrap on you

Corey 34:42

you just because somebody is funny in private doesn't mean they need to be funny in public And Al Gore's persona was like the opposite of funny in public. It was like the boring guy who invented

Zain 34:51

invented the internet. Six

Zain 34:52

Six more jokes and he would have had Florida.

Zain 34:55

Let's move on to our next segment. Our next segment, One Persuades, We Get Persuaded. Carter, it is time. It is time. We saved this topic from the last episode that Corey and I were doing because it didn't deserve a drive-by. Although I didn't think that the conversation on charisma and comedy would take 35 minutes. But here we are.

Zain 35:15

Carter, we're going to talk about Daniel Smith, internal polling, Rick Bell.

Zain 35:19

Corey, can I ask you to do some heavy lifting? Would it be possible to give the broad strokes of what I'm talking about here? I can try to do it, but I suspect you might have the better words to do it if I can put you on the spot for a second.

Corey 35:32

Maybe I can start. You might have

Corey 35:35

actual polling ahead of you. um so

Corey 35:38

so there was a poll that was teased out by the daniel smith campaign as a series of boards on social media that was effectively used to try to rebut some of the criticisms that have been leveled against daniel smith the

Corey 35:50

the uh sovereignty act is unpopular we can't win with daniel smith those were the two big ones but there were probably six or seven questions that were that was sort of there that were asked and daniel smith just dropped these one day saying Saying, hey, we did this poll and look at the results of this poll. Look, turns out people in Alberta like the Sovereignty Act, according to this poll. Look, it looks like I would win an election against Rachel Notley, according to this poll. Not by a ton, by the way. Also, it was like by five points.

Corey 36:21

And then these were shared and debated online. And I don't know if there's more you want to say about the specifics in here, but I almost don't know that it's worth getting into the specifics because there were a few things

Corey 36:33

was your methodology? When did you run the poll? What was your sample size? How was your sample size constructed? What were the actual questions? What was the order of the questions? And so on. And without that information, and certainly knowing that the person who's providing you this poll and apparently commissioned this poll has a reason to ask questions in certain ways, I kind of feel the value of this poll is zero. It did, however, lead to a Rick Bell column. It did lead to a lot of social media activity. And it does fit into a general picture of Danielle Smith trying to calm the waters and saying things will be okay, serving some of her campaign interests.

Corey 37:16

I find it problematic. I find it problematic that you can drop a poll like that in this fashion during a leadership race, because you are not allowed to during a general election. During a general election, either provincially or federally, you need to provide that information I just mentioned, the

Corey 37:31

the script and the questions, or else you're violating the law. So this seems like a bit of a gap. And it's also, I think in general, we should be deeply skeptical of partisan polls when there's an obvious interest in these things. Now, maybe this poll is even all on the level.

Corey 37:48

But if it is, I'm wondering why they didn't provide some of the things that I'm talking about.

Carter 37:52

it wasn't, Corey. Because it wasn't. So

Zain 37:55

So let's get into this, Carter, because this is what I want to talk about. So, Corey, thank you for that baseline. That's actually very helpful.

Zain 38:00

I won't get into any details of the poll except for this.

Zain 38:03

Daniel Smith, 45. Travis Tave, 28. Brian Jean, 9. Todd Lohan, 7. Rebecca Schultz, 6. Everyone else way far behind.

Zain 38:10

So, Carter, it is a poll that

Zain 38:12

that Daniel Smith and their camp haven't shied away from. They haven't said, hey, listen, we didn't produce this. No, this is from us.

Zain 38:19

They put it out there. There's a Rick Bell column written about it. He calls it, we're not talking, revealed

Zain 38:24

revealed until now numbers from, no, this is a new poll. He kind of says 1,700,

Zain 38:28

,700, 1,800 UCP members eligible to vote as part of this poll. It's done by this pollster. It doesn't mention the Smith affiliation as related to that. So there's something to be said there. But Carter, you know, on this podcast, on television, on radio, on our commentary, we've talked about this concept of leaking your internals.

Zain 38:46

Is this that or is this something different? I want to examine that first before we jump into this. Is this the concept of when we say leaking your internals, is

Zain 38:55

is this what we just saw here six days ago?

Carter 38:58

Yeah, this is exactly what leaking your internals are. I mean, it's probably one of the most bizarre outcomes from leaking your internals. Most of the time, what you're trying to do is just get someone to actually kind of think that maybe you're in the game or there's a momentum shift happening. You're very rarely asking them to publish it because no one should be publishing a poll in the province of Alberta. or in any other province for that matter, that doesn't start right off by saying what the methodology is. Who did you sample? Who does the random sample consist of? So the fact that they say that they're polling UCP members, was it all the UCP members? Was it the UCP members at the cutoff date? Was it UCP members at a different date? We don't know. They weren't clear. the questions aren't shared if

Carter 39:48

if you if you show me a poll with an answer without the question i'm sorry but that's not an actual poll that that answer can be crafted to whatever question you wanted to hit you just if

Carter 40:00

if you don't see these things you should be immediately dismissing them on their face and then an internal pollster saying you know this is what we found what's the motivation for the polling company?

Carter 40:12

And this isn't a real polling company. You don't see these polls from Hamish Marshall being run up the flagpole on the national basis. I mean, this is a guy whose job it is, much like mine, to get people elected. And was he using an IVR technology?

Carter 40:31

I did an IVR sample out here in Surrey the other day. 50% of the people who responded to the IVR were over 70 years old.

Carter 40:42

IVR is useful for certain tools, but I certainly wouldn't use IVR to conduct a poll. It couldn't have been an online sample because it was the membership of the UCP. So did they hand dial? How did they dial these people? How did they choose? What was the randomization model? All of these things matter because the outcome changes.

Carter 41:04

this is, I mean, it's a small pool of people, right? A hundred and what would we say? 123,000 people.

Carter 41:11

I mean, first of all, the random sample that's still required to randomly sample 123,000 people with any degree of accuracies still going to be about 400. How long are you going to have to dial 123,000 people to get 400 people to respond?

Carter 41:27

What comes up when you ask the questions? Does it say the Danielle Smith campaign or does it say Hamish Marshall's campaign? So,

Corey 41:33

So, you know what? I think let's

Corey 41:35

let's let's just let's back up this horse a tiny bit because you're asking the right questions and i think the problem is we don't have those answers that's

Zain 41:43

but let's talk about why those things are important though i think that's correct yeah

Corey 41:47

yeah but like let's also chill out it is possible to be a pollster who works for a politician and still be a a good pollster who can figure these things out not

Carter 41:57

not the challenge is the challenge carter

Corey 42:00

challenge is the information uh uh whether it's available to us and whether we're able to process it because you can look i mean here's the reality of the situation you can take it in as an input and you can say well well maybe i should be a little bit skeptical about some of these things because of the source if that's all you know there and it's all available for you to see easily like not even hidden but like right in front of you

Corey 42:23

these things are coming on but

Corey 42:24

but the challenge becomes

Corey 42:26

it sort of leans on the fact that a lot of people are poll naive so they're not even knowing that some of these things are particularly challenging.

Zain 42:33

And this is where it kind of brings up the broader question, right? Of like what we should know. And Carter, you know, one of the things I want to talk about is how

Zain 42:41

how this led to a Rick Bell column, right? Because you said this led to one of the more bizarre outcomes that you've seen of a campaign's internal pools being released or being floated out there?

Carter 42:57

The bottom line is that this

Carter 43:01

this fault doesn't lie with Hamish. This fault doesn't lie with the Danielle Smith campaign.

Carter 43:07

The Danielle Smith campaign's job is to spin this out to get the coverage that they want to get. The fault lies with the media not understanding that they're seeing an internal number, not knowing enough about polls to ask the question, not asking what was the question that was actually asked when you're showing me these results. These are the questions. I've often thought that Paul Ferry, who does all these great classes on politics municipally, federally, provincially, he should do a class for journalists on what statistics are and how to read a poll. Because the media class doesn't understand what they're they're looking for. And if they don't know what they're looking for, they don't know when they're being misled.

Carter 43:55

And I say that as someone who can and does work with the media when we're discussing polls.

Carter 44:00

I like to think that I'm trying to be honest, but not everybody plays the same game that I do.

Zain 44:05

Okay, so let's talk about it that way. Because and before we do, Corey, I have to ask you from your perspective, we've talked often about, you know, the

Zain 44:13

the media, maybe not having the literacy, Maybe not have the understanding.

Zain 44:17

I'm not sure I always buy that in certain cases. Like there is a case to be made that that Rick Bell, we don't know, right, may have known that this was the internal Daniel Smith numbers. It may have had a sense that that these were associated related to of the campaign. And so I don't know if I necessarily buy that there's a literacy delta, at least maybe not in this case, as there may be in other cases.

Corey 44:41

Well, so look, I think that we do need to draw a distinction between journalists and columnists. And of course, Rick Bell is a columnist, which means he puts opinions out there. And so perhaps he is just

Corey 44:53

just sort of picking the things that allow him to make the point that he wants to make in his column. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? If that's what's going on,

Corey 45:01

you know what, I'll

Corey 45:02

I'll let other people sort of parse that one out. But I do think

Corey 45:07

think that I've certainly had enough kind of like peers in to think that perhaps the media doesn't have like perfect poll literacy.

Corey 45:16

And the reality is I run into so very few people in my day-to-day life who do. I mean, the number of common conversations I have about, okay,

Corey 45:23

okay, but this is actually what margin of error means. Margin of error doesn't mean it's as likely to be 3% off as not at all. It's following a normal curve. It's actually much more likely to be the number reported. reported you know you just you think about it's it's a curve it's not like equal probability within these bands uh the number of times i've had to talk about order effect and why that matters and you know yeah okay so they asked the same question across two polls but the first time they said who are you going to vote for after asking were you aware of jason or of justin trudeau's blackface scandal right well that's going to change your numbers right and there There are some of these concepts that I'm

Corey 46:00

I'm not necessarily even sure are intuitive. And certainly, I think we would all benefit

Corey 46:06

benefit from refreshers on a regular basis on these things. And I do think that the journalist can

Corey 46:12

can sometimes in a busy role just sort of report these things, perhaps without having the full context that a critic of polls would be able to provide.

Zain 46:21

Okay, Carter, let's make this constructive then, because you guys have both given me, you've both persuaded me. You've one persuaded me. um, that, that we should, that we should make this constructive. So Corey's put out a few things. If Carter, you were helping us put the one pager together. Okay. This is the one page syllabus that whether it's Paul Ferry, whoever's going to teach this course. Okay. We're, we're getting our input into it. What needs to be on there? Corey's talked about a few things in terms of, uh, you know, the, the, the importance of the

Zain 46:52

the order effect, uh, question construction. construction.

Zain 46:55

I also said how to truly understand margin of error. What else are you adding to this list, Carter? What else are you adding and why to the list? And Corey, I'll swing back at you to build a list further. So we've got order effect, question construction. We've got margin of error. What else are we adding, Carter, in terms of what folks need to truly understand?

Carter 47:14

Sample size, super important. Understanding how the sample was derived and who the general market of this sample was. So for example, if you do a poll where you're testing landlines only, or even landlines in cell phone with a blocked number or something along those lines, you're going to get a much different response rates from different demographics.

Corey 47:38

And on a corollary to the margin of error, margin of error is a concept that only applies to a truly probabilistic sample, like true randomness, which you do not get from just calling phone phone numbers these days well

Carter 47:51

well and one would argue that you don't get the same results so it back in the day the gold standard was picking up the telephone and calling landlines because everybody had a landline and you had a chance of getting your full sample done um the gold standard now is is one that basically takes people offline all right you know online then to the telephone and then kind of works everything back through bigger samples because it's so hard to get like Like, do you know how hard it is to get 18 to 30-year-olds on an IVR sample? I mean, it's almost an impossibility. To get them to answer a telephone call at all is nearly impossible. They're doing things now in one-question samples using texts and online

Carter 48:36

online advertising. Everything is changing. So if you don't understand that methodology by which the sample is put together and how the random sample was actually accessed, you will never know what the outcome is. Like, I know that when I see a poll that is conducted by telephone, I know that it skews a certain way. If I see another poll that is conducted by online sample, I know how it skews. You know, each one is different. Its build is the same. And

Carter 49:05

And then you get the random IVR

Carter 49:07

IVR sample that's thrown in there now as well. And I'll tell you something, I wouldn't – it's

Carter 49:13

it's not worth the paper it's printed on if it's an IVR sample. so all

Carter 49:19

all of those things come together to just talk about the sample the other thing um that i would probably the sample size and the methodology the other thing that i would look at and cory did you do

Carter 49:30

do we still even have that information of the of the uh the

Carter 49:34

bias that you that you played that you created when we were at h and k do

Carter 49:39

you remember that uh

Corey 49:40

uh boy like we did so much interesting research at that time i the one that i'd pulled up as we were talking here was actually about how questions matter and how changing the question can absolutely screw with you mean just simply a language is that what you're suggesting

Corey 49:57

read that that's really

Corey 49:58

yeah so um we

Corey 50:00

we did this in the context of just after the 2015 election there was a

Corey 50:05

conversation about how it was going to be the last first past the post election and then there was some potential that perhaps that electoral reform commission one of the things that might come out of it would be um a national referendum on whether we should change our voting system and we actually ran a test as a as a pod we did this like we we paid for the sample and we did this uh where we said well well interesting what might like just the changing of the question do and the basic thesis was you

Corey 50:35

you change the question you change the outcome this has always been my problem with referendums, right?

Corey 50:41

It's not about the answer, it's about the question and finding the most neutral phrasing of it. The debate over the question determines everything here and here. Let me illustrate this in

Corey 50:51

in a very plain sense. So we ran a survey, I think it was at least 500 each, but I don't have that in front of me here. But we asked random samples constructed the same way, the

Corey 51:04

the same question or two different questions that both had yes or no answers to it. We kept sort of everything constant except for the question itself. So

Corey 51:11

So we asked, should Canada change the method it elects members of parliament from first past the post to proportional representation?

Corey 51:19

45.8% of that sample said yes. 54.2% said no. Okay, that's interesting here, right? Well, then we asked a different version. Do you agree that Canada should update its voting method for federal elections to proportional representation? 58

Corey 51:34

58.3% said yes this time. And that's a swing of 13 points. 41.7% said no.

Corey 51:42

So what the hell's going on here? Well, the phrasing, well, perhaps subtle, is really important. So in the one where people were supportive of proportional representation, we asked, do you agree, rather than should, right?

Corey 51:56

So immediately, like you're agreeable if you say yes, you're disagreeable if you say no. Bandwagon effect.

Corey 52:04

Update its voting method rather than change its voting method. So update that's that's got a value judgment. That's talking about improving a voting system. Right. And all of a sudden you think, OK, that's that's maybe better because it's called updating. So that's going to push things towards. Yes. And then the final change is it talked about updating voting for federal elections to proportional representation rather than saying you're going to elect your member of parliament differently. So we made

Zain 52:32

made it about the

Corey 52:32

the system rather than your individual member of parliament. So with those three small changes, the results went from 45.8% yes to 58.3% yes. Yes. And if you're curious, it's an online sample, doesn't really technically have margin of error, but it would be outside of margin of error on those particular points.

Corey 52:53

you don't know the question of

Corey 52:55

of the poll question that's been put in front of you and you only see the results. Yeah, Daniel, that

Zain 52:59

that should be a huge red flag. Exactly. That should be a huge red flag.

Zain 53:04

right. And especially as it relates to some of the deeper down questions, which perhaps, Carter, when we kind of bring it back to this poll, rebuff what we've seen before around lobe. There's a lot of support for the Sovereignty Act, right? Like when you talk about what Corey just mentioned around question language, even your own mind can start thinking about how the phraseology, and we don't know this, right? Like this is speculative. We don't know this, but using this as a jumping off point, how phraseology and other things can

Zain 53:31

can shift an outcome. Isn't that right, Carter?

Carter 53:33

Yeah. I think that if you, the challenge is that if

Carter 53:38

you don't have all the facts and you don't have have an understanding of how all these facts fit together, then it's virtually impossible to read a poll properly. And that's why, you

Carter 53:49

you know, that's why I've been so critical of the media in polling in general, because in general, they do a terrible job. They do a much better job when they're talking to someone like Janet Brown, who's a, you know, a renowned pollster who is able to parse it together for them that has

Carter 54:07

has a history of being able to speak to the media and making it understandable for them in super easy to understand bytes. But God forbid you ever give them a table of crosstabs. Like if you gave a, if I gave a bad poll to Corey and I said to Corey, break down this poll and tell me why it doesn't make sense. He'd be able to go through the numbers and look at the crosstabs. In fact, I just did this recently. We went through and looked at crosstabs and we could see very clearly where an oversample occurred within one of the crosstabs. And you go, okay, well, there's a big problem because if we oversample this area, then we're no longer able. Just

Zain 54:42

Just so folks can understand, when you say crosstabulation, you mean it's the questions that have been asked, crosstabulated with one of the demographics, the regions, the age, the gender, income levels, et cetera, right? Just to be totally clear. Or it's two questions kind of crosstabulated together. So it could even be

Corey 55:02

be two demographic Demographic questions combine, Zane. And

Corey 55:05

you're looking at the crosstabs on the demographic side, sometimes that stuff just pops out at you and you say, OK, well, listen, our entire youth sample is people making over $300,000 a year. What the fuck

Corey 55:17

are we supposed to make with that? And

Zain 55:18

And there's only four of them. And you can figure all that out. So, Carl, that's what you mean by crosstabs. Keep going on that.

Carter 55:23

Exactly. And you can see that things are divided into two halves, but one half is actually much larger than the other half. Does that accurately reflect the population in those two halves? And you can go through and you can pick out a poll and then a reputable pollster will weight things so that it accurately represents the actual outcomes. And that waiting process is very, very challenging. It does not just fall off the pen easily. It is something that, are we waiting just for age? Are we waiting, as Corey would have just suggested, for income? Are we waiting for district or community?

Carter 56:00

What are we waiting for? You can actually wait for the past performances of elections. There's all kinds of different ways that you can weight the poll in order to get it more closely accurate, right? So what data have we accumulated over our history of data collection that will enable us to help make this more accurate? Not to shift the results, but to actually represent more accurately the randomization of the poll sample to the general population that we're trying to reflect. And that stuff is just lost on the average person. So, and by the average person, I'm also including the media, who can be oftentimes fed a poll that doesn't make sense. And they write it up like it is the truth from God himself, or herself, probably. And that truth is then distributed through the media. and there's a big question as to whether or not the public follows the polls or the polls follow the public. And

Carter 57:02

And I would argue that the public, given

Carter 57:05

given the data that I've seen, the public follows the polls much more. And there's a whole thing

Carter 57:12

thing on engagement structure. Like you only become engaged the moment you answer the phone that we can have a whole conversation about. But But bottom line, it is engagement that dictates outcome, and the engagement only begins when the poll is conducted. And that fundamentally changes everything because most people aren't engaging at the exact same time.

Zain 57:34

Put a pin on that particular one, Carter. I want to round out the conversation with that because that's fascinating. Corey, let me give you a summary of our list thus far. Order effect, question construction and language, margin of error to understand if it's a truly random sample, sample size and how the poll was constructed, and cross-tabulations and how to read them. What else needs to go on the syllabus, Corey? As I round this out with you, and Carter, I'll give you one more take, and then I want to go in to round this conversation out. Carter's content here about this concept of public following polls or vice versa. What else needs to go on the syllabus, Corey?

Corey 58:08

So the sample size, Carter alluded to it, but we didn't really unpack. The way the

Corey 58:13

math works is basically

Corey 58:15

any population you're going to need about 400 people to get a respectable margin of error and you might think like how

Corey 58:23

how is 400 good enough for canada how is it also equally good enough for the ucp membership and then that's

Corey 58:29

the way kind of the the math works out on it all i don't know that we need to spend a ton of time on it but the point is you need a sufficient sample size in both cases but also a sample size of 4 000 is not really going to tell you a ton that a sample size as a 500 would have nationally, unless you're breaking into those crosstabs and trying to get some of the smaller demographic groups and get a bit of an understanding on it.

Corey 58:53

There's something though that Carter said that is the kind of like the

Corey 58:57

the kernel of the most important thing to think about when you think about polls, right? And he

Corey 59:04

talked about how, for example, in an IVR poll, it's really difficult to get young voters on the line. and how do you adjust for that and all sorts of different people have taken all sorts of different mechanisms to get there um one

Corey 59:18

one of the things that carter said there along the way though is when he hears about a poll methodology he's like so i know how it skews well be a little careful with that because people do take these additional steps to try to pull out those errors to get you as close to possible as the real deal if

Corey 59:36

if they are generally a pollster who is being measured on how accurate they are. And that's a really important caveat here. And this is the point I want to make about incentives, right? Polsters who are like media polsters or polsters who work for a variety of clients, such as Janet Brown, really reputable polsters have a huge incentive to correct for these things in a scientific methodological way to come as close to reality as possible. Their incentive is an incentive towards accuracy. Getting it right. Where you have to be careful is that if you are a pollster who works a lot with partisan pollsters or like partisan organizations, and perhaps your poll is even being weaponized to say, look, this is okay, therefore you should vote for me and create like that self-fulfilling thing, Stephen Carter is, your

Corey 1:00:24

your incentive is entirely different. Your incentive is to keep the client happy in that case. And what the client wants in that case is a poll that shows the story they're trying to tell. So incentives are important to keep in mind too. And I think that most conversations about polls, if

Corey 1:00:42

if you're a journalist, could probably begin and end there, right? Right. Is this a pollster

Corey 1:00:47

pollster who is putting their stuff out into the public domain and relies on being accurate to get future work? Or is this somebody who was hired to do a poll whose future work actually comes from how well they play ball with the candidate?

Zain 1:01:00

parse. Carter, I'm putting incentives at the top of the list. Order effective, question construction, margin of error, sample size, question language, cross tabulation. Anything else to add to the syllabus that that needs to be constructed for this course?

Carter 1:01:18

don't know i think um i think that that's that

Carter 1:01:22

that that's pretty much it right now i think that there's probably advanced courses that we could go into uh depending on the students you know desire to to want to learn more i would love like there's a robson uh fletcher is a data specialist with cbc and i think that there should be a data specialist at every every news station now, because data is driving our decisions and it's driving the way that we do politics.

Carter 1:01:51

politics. It's driving the way that we do transportation. It's driving the way that we responded to COVID. It is this

Carter 1:01:58

this new frontier that's really not that new anymore. And it needs to be understood understood um very

Carter 1:02:07

very well if it's actually going to to be a vital part of stories and i would suggest to you right now that polls are the crack cocaine of of politics uh political reporting especially and

Carter 1:02:18

and you need to if you're going to be that reliant upon them you need to understand them a lot more okay

Zain 1:02:25

okay carter thanks for that we'll get to eric granny to round out the rest i want to talk about yeah no problem no problem at all uh cory let's talk about incentives this is what what Carter was alluding to. This is what you explicitly mentioned. Corey, you threw out the word weaponization. Carter threw out the term, do the polls follow the public or do the public follow the polls? Carter, can you explain what you mean by that when you say the public follows the polls? Because I suspect in some ways it may not be dissimilar to Corey throwing out the term weaponization of polling in some way.

Carter 1:02:57

The public follows the polls because they're looking to to figure out who they should vote for. And they'd like to vote for the winner. There's this idea that people take

Carter 1:03:08

take this rational view of politics and they review the platforms and the information

Carter 1:03:14

from top to bottom and make an informed choice. That's just bullshit. They make a decision based on a snap judgment. And oftentimes that snap judgment is, I may as well vote for the guy who's going to win or the woman who's going to win.

Carter 1:03:25

That decision is not informed, but it is a large portion of how we choose outcomes. This is why momentum, the underdog effect that I've been able to work on with Jyoti Gondek, Nahed Nenshi, Alison Redford, why does the underdog effect work? Well, same reason that you choose the underdog in the Super Bowl. Everybody wants to see the underdog win. And if it looks like the underdog's got momentum, then all of a sudden everybody switches switches their votes over to the underdog with momentum.

Carter 1:03:52

That's where the polls lead the public. So if the polls are showing momentum, we knew with Nenshi in 2010, we had a poll that came out the Tuesday before the voting day on Monday, and it had us tied. And that was it. We'd won. It

Carter 1:04:07

Because the tie showed that we were the ones with momentum.

Carter 1:04:10

And momentum then moved. That meant that everybody moved to us. And we didn't even have to do anything after that. just work beautifully. So

Carter 1:04:17

So that's what I mean when the polls lead the public. The public is not necessarily leading the polls because a

Carter 1:04:25

a lot of the people who are answering these polls have put no thought into their

Carter 1:04:31

their responses until the second they answer the telephone. And it's the mood of that particular moment that determines the outcome in the poll. The poll is not necessarily then a a reflection of in-depth thought. It is a reflection of 400

Carter 1:04:44

400 people's attitudes at that moment. And that

Zain 1:04:47

that particular snapshot. And

Carter 1:04:49

And that we keep talking about a poll is a snapshot. A poll is a snapshot. Well, what if a poll is a snapshot that the general population then tries to emulate on election day?

Carter 1:05:00

That's an interesting question.

Zain 1:05:02

And that's where, Corey, the term weaponization can happen too. Because if you put your thumb on the scale, for example, if you say that we're not changing how we vote, but we're updating it. And people are triggered by the word update. Great. Yeah. Update sounds awesome. It's a value judgment to your point. I like to update my phone. I get new features. There's new possibilities. Great. Let's go with update. And then you could see the downstream effects of using a poll like that to then construct a broader public opinion.

Corey 1:05:32

Yeah. Well, look, I mean, when

Corey 1:05:34

when I talk about weaponizing, I mean that, but I actually mean something broader too. And maybe take it to a bit of a different setting. Imagine that you're, well, listen, I worked in the government for years. This happened. This is not a hypothetical. There would often be debates, policy debates, debates about opinion, and then there would be polling that was done. Well, let's see how Albertans feel about this. Some of these questions are knowable. Let's go there and answer things. And when I talk about the weaponization of polling, you know we we know there are many different ways to ask questions we know that there are many different ways to get outcomes depending on how you want to frame things what you put in the window ahead of the question and all of that um

Corey 1:06:17

but what happens uh is you can have people go out and do polling and then they

Corey 1:06:24

they can take it to the next time there's that policy debate or that next conversation or god forbid even with the premier and

Corey 1:06:30

and if the premier hasn't seen that poll and the the premier will say well i disagree and they'll say well premier here's a poll and

Corey 1:06:35

and they'll put that poll on the table right and that's a weaponization of a poll polls are often used in workforces particularly in government to end debates right like you're talking about your opinion i'm giving you facts but everything we've

Corey 1:06:50

talked about right here i think should underline that polling is as much an art as it is a science and uh it's not always a fact simply because a poll says so we haven't even talked about some of the other things in that advanced course carter's talking about but we often do you

Corey 1:07:06

you might have asked a very novel concept something they've never thought about before and they've given you an opinion cheaply and they will change that opinion cheaply right if

Corey 1:07:14

if you're not talking about something that they've thought about their whole life but

Corey 1:07:19

when you're in the media polls

Corey 1:07:21

polls do serve sort of a similar debate ending you know format think Think about how many columns there were from how many columnists about where they thought the race was going and who was up and who was down in the UCP and how they all sort of just get squashed by a poll, a poll that says, actually, this is who's up. This is where everybody is going. And that's the power of a poll. And that's the danger of a poll, that they get treated as data when

Corey 1:07:46

when you can only really do so if you're following a series of best practices that you best be informed on if you're going to be treating it as data. So that's the risk.

Corey 1:07:57

The other thing I will say, because we didn't talk about it in your big lineup of challenges, is there

Corey 1:08:03

is something called response and non-response bias in polls.

Corey 1:08:07

And this is something I've pulled my own hair about with CRTC rules that require you to say who the sponsor of a poll is when it goes

Corey 1:08:13

now. You guys will both remember me arguing with the CRTC about these, about how it will make polling worse. course and the reason is well i'll use a very real example here imagine you have a poll and it starts with this is polling group a calling on behalf of danielle smith we have some questions now

Corey 1:08:33

you do that poll or not it's

Corey 1:08:35

it's going to be driven in some part about how you feel about the people who are asking the polls and the answers you give or not similarly will be based on how you feel about the person who is giving the poll so

Corey 1:08:45

so let me ask you a really simple one if

Corey 1:08:47

if i call from polling in group A on behalf of Danielle Smith, would you like to answer some questions? That very first question is, are you going to answer some questions, right? Do you think you're more likely to say yes or no if you like Danielle Smith? And

Corey 1:08:58

And do you think you're going to be more or less likely to say yes or no if you hate Danielle Smith?

Corey 1:09:03

So that changes the pool out of your sample right off the bat.

Corey 1:09:07

And so there are challenges here. And unless we know the actual script and we can actually account for those things and we can think about those things, it's

Corey 1:09:15

it's very difficult to treat these things as data.

Corey 1:09:18

And yet, we're all asked to treat all polls as data all of the time.

Zain 1:09:24

Carter, talk to us about weaponization. And then what I'll do is I'll summarize our syllabus to hand off to whoever. Who knows, we might put this course together, Carter. But give me one more round on weaponization, and then we'll summarize where we've been on this conversation on polling.

Carter 1:09:39

Best example of weaponization and polling I've ever seen is Alan Hallman working

Carter 1:09:43

for Gordon Dirks in 2014, the by-election that Greg Clark was fighting.

Carter 1:09:48

He got a poll that was a couple of weeks old and released it. Only one media outlet covered it, Gary Bobrovitz with Global Television. And it showed that it was a two-way race between the Wild Rose and the PCs. We'd just put out a poll the week before saying it was a two-way race between the PCs and the Alberta party, the Alberta, that, that first poll, the one that we put out was forgotten. This poll became the, uh, the,

Carter 1:10:19

the, you know, the Bible. If you wanted to beat the wild rose, you had to vote for the PCs. Uh, if you wanted to beat the PCs, you had to vote for the wild rose. And ultimately the

Carter 1:10:29

the Alberta party came second. Greg Clark came second in that by-election.

Carter 1:10:33

Had that poll not been released, that old poll that was not accurate, that did not ask the right questions, that did not have the right information, if

Carter 1:10:40

if that poll hadn't been released, then

Carter 1:10:42

then it would have been between Greg Clark and Gordon Dirks, and people would have voted for Greg Clark to defeat the PCs. How do I know that? Because the general election was held within six months afterwards, and Greg Clark was the person who could beat the PCs, and he did beat beat the PCs. Calgary Elbow was not caught up in the NDP wave because the most likely group to beat the PCs in Calgary Elbow was clearly known to be Greg Clark. That is the perfect example of how polls can be weaponized to drive the outcome instead of having polls used to reflect the current situation.

Zain 1:11:21

Nicely done. Okay, let's summarize this. We've got order effect. Actually, you know what? We're going to put incentives at the top because I like what Corey said there. Order effect, question construction. Corey, I've added a sub-bullet on novel concepts. Margin of error. I'm also adding response and non-response bias. Sample size and how it's polled. Question language we talked about. Cross-tabulations, how to read them. And that is it. That is the syllabus. Nicely done, guys. Carter, any final thoughts before we move on? no

Carter 1:11:52

no i'm just i'm shocked that cory came up with so many good ideas i

Zain 1:11:57

it's like it's kind of like kind of like he knows what he's doing um you know not dissimilar to keith urban when he just fills out a stadium of fans you know he his uh charisma on uh on 11 carter let's

Zain 1:12:11

let's move it on to our final segment our over under and our lightning round i could spend a whole segment and whole conversation whole episode on what i'm going to talk about next But Carter, Pierre Polyev has hired his chief of staff, the opposition leader, the conservative leader has hired his chief of staff with an old school hire, one might say, you know, with Ian Todd used to be chief of staff to Alliance leader Stockwell Day, also used to spend significant time with Reform Party leader Preston Manning. so he's gone in that direction. But Carter, chiefs of staff for opposition leaders is my question. So we've talked extensively about the chief as it relates to ministers, as it relates to the prime minister, the premier, but chiefs of staff of opposition leaders, overrated or underrated?

Carter 1:12:57

I think underrated, because I think in opposition, you have the tendency or the capacity to really go too far quite often. And a good chief of staff can make

Carter 1:13:07

make sure that the opposition isn't just gunning for that opposition role forever, but they actually have a good strategy to go from opposition all the way through to government. And I think that Ian Todd, I know Ian Todd, I quite like Ian Todd. I think he's a very capable person. And it'd be very good for Pierre Polyev to have a stabilizing influence like someone like Ian Todd.

Zain 1:13:31

Corey, overrated, underrated, opposition leader, chiefs of staff?

Corey 1:13:37

Well, I think underrated because the

Corey 1:13:40

reality is when you're in a government, you have so many resources and there's so many levers you can pull and there's so many people around who can assist you with things that you can sort of kick off to and you can

Corey 1:13:51

blame the bureaucracy and all of that. But when you're in opposition, you're

Corey 1:13:55

you're the leader and you've got your team and

Corey 1:13:57

and it's a a team you somewhat share with your caucus, but you've got your caucus and a chief of staff sometimes has to be, you know, the bad guy and come in and say the unpopular thing that the leader can't say. Sometimes has to be the person who keeps everybody on message, just as Stephen Carter's talked about. And there's really nobody else who can do that role because the team is so much smaller. So you don't get like the luxury of having a chief of staff who can delegate these these important roles to five other competent people in that orbit, each specialized on it. The chief of staff when you're in the opposition needs

Corey 1:14:31

kind of be the cook and bottle washer and just a hyper-competent individual who can manage a lot of competing interests without the same level of support you get when you're in the PMO.

Zain 1:14:42

Corey, I'm going to stick with you for our next one. I'm also going to keep it on Pierre Prolliev because one of the things that this article mentions outside of the fact that Ian Todd has been hired and Carter says he knows him and he's been around politics for a while, this individual. But this article also highlights, Corey, that the staff search for Pierre Poliev has been challenging, that he's had difficulty getting people to step away from their corporate gigs to help him out, which seems perhaps interesting considering he won in a runaway train fashion. Many feel he's the front runner for the next election. We've discussed that on this program. So, Corey, overrated or underrated in your mind, the staffing challenges for Pierre Poliev. And once again, we could do an entire episode on staffing challenges and what what that means but in your hot take overrated

Corey 1:15:27

it's underrated but i i'm not laying it at his feet i'm

Corey 1:15:31

i think in general we have created in politicians a role that is deeply unpalatable where you're asking people to work 24 7 for less money than they would be making elsewhere and less respect uh than they would be getting in most other roles certainly you get the limelight you get the popularity but that's you

Corey 1:15:49

you have the other half the population hating you all of the time doubly

Zain 1:15:56

political staff because you don't even get that limelight kick right

Corey 1:15:59

asking people to to take on these roles where your salary will always be in question you have no job security it is a 24-7 job and in many ways i think it's a miracle that anybody does the job in the first place there's like three jobs in the world i can't understand why anybody takes.

Corey 1:16:23

Because ultimately, all of them require you to give so much and risk so much and get so relatively little back in return.

Corey 1:16:33

I'm so thankful they all do it, especially the bike couriers. But it is just wild to me that anybody takes these these jobs.

Zain 1:16:40

Carter, Corey says, you know, this is not at Pierre Polyev's feet, but overrated, underrated, his challenge finding staff. You know, I mentioned earlier the context, having people move away from private sector roles, but may seem a bit surprising considering the runaway nature train of Pierre Polyev and many people considering him to be the favorite.

Carter 1:17:01

I think it actually shows a real maturity. I think there would have been no problem finding someone who was young and immature and fit

Carter 1:17:08

fit right into the mold of some of the worst excesses of Pierre Pelliette, I'm

Carter 1:17:13

I'm quite certain that he would have been able to fill the role with what, you know, we

Carter 1:17:17

we used to lovingly refer to as the boys in short pants when it was Stephen Harper's government.

Carter 1:17:22

And I think that the

Carter 1:17:23

the fact that he didn't, the fact that he waited to hire someone Someone who was of

Carter 1:17:30

of the stature of Ian Todd brings in this idea that maybe

Carter 1:17:34

maybe he is looking for someone to be a partner instead of someone just to be a yes person. So I'm quite certain he could have found lots of people who would have taken the gig. I'm not sure that he would have found anybody who would have been qualified to take the gig.

Carter 1:17:47

I know there's lots of people who will be chief of staffs, but not lots of chiefs

Carter 1:17:52

chiefs of staff. You know, it's a tough job.

Zain 1:17:55

Carter, are you in or are you out on Jason Kenney's goodbye tour and what you've seen thus far? You know, we talked about the speech and the charm offensive conversation we had at length. But also this weekend, he spoke to the Alberta strong or the Canada strong and free conference and read you're in Alberta. And he said, Listen, my intention was never to be in this gig for a long time. Even if I ran next election, I would have ditched 18 months in.

Zain 1:18:17

As an overall construct from your mind, what you've seen of Jason Kenney and his goodbye tour? Are you in or are you out from a strategy? lens on what you're seeing?

Carter 1:18:26

Yeah, no, I mean, I was leaving Jody Gondek's office probably within the next two or three weeks before I got, you know, but then I got fired.

Carter 1:18:33

So I was going to leave anyways. Alison Redford, I mean, when I got fired on election day in 2015, or 2012, I wasn't gonna, I wasn't gonna stick around very long anyways.

Carter 1:18:46

So I totally understand Jason Kenney's idea that he wasn't going to stick around. That makes perfect sense to me. But the truth of of the matter is he was going to stick around as long as he could because uh cory has said that being premier is better than not being premier most first

Carter 1:19:00

first ministers only get about 10 years and they

Carter 1:19:05

they don't get a crack at the top job i mean when was the last time we saw a premier even contest uh for the top job um it

Carter 1:19:14

it just doesn't happen so i think it was stanfield wasn't not like way back uh

Corey 1:19:20

if i mean i guess because ray was interim and i can't think of anybody else yeah

Corey 1:19:25

somebody will correct us yeah it's

Carter 1:19:27

it's it's a very tough thing to to do to be the premier to take the to take the hits that you take in your home province um and then turn that into something vaguely resembling a federal career that's really hard so i think that jason kenney

Carter 1:19:41

writing his own exit strategy. I give him full props for that. I may have had to write one or two of my own exit strategies, so go for it.

Carter 1:19:53

That's the way he should be doing it, but let's not go crazy. He would have stayed around much longer if he was given the opportunity because I think at the end of the day, Jason Kenney likes to govern. I'm just not sure that like provincial politics.

Zain 1:20:07

Corey, from the strategist's eye, from a strategist's eye, are you in or out on Jason Kenney's goodbye tour?

Corey 1:20:15

I'm in. I think this is what you do when you're leaving a job like this. You take the opportunity to redefine all of those years, the good and the bad. You kind

Corey 1:20:25

of brush off all of the shit and you just polish it up and you say, mission accomplished. And nobody ever pretends otherwise, right? Right. And and ultimately,

Corey 1:20:35

ultimately, I think that he is benefiting from a bit of a well, we started talking about all of the people who are saying, oh, where was this guy? Right.

Corey 1:20:44

Well, to Carter's earlier point, he was always there. People are just looking at him a little bit differently now. This is his opportunity to, you know, the next six months in Alberta politics might be wild and you might have as a kind of a common commentary like, geez, where I wish we had Jason Kenney. right um you just don't know and and i think what he's doing is trying to set himself up as this affable guy people think fondly of on his way out the door and i

Corey 1:21:10

i mean it's better than sulking on the way out is it not i mean this this seems like a pretty reasonable approach final

Zain 1:21:16

final question cory i'm going to start with you charm in politics charisma charm overrated or underrated oh

Corey 1:21:24

oh underrated big time as

Corey 1:21:26

as steve and i were saying it's the small group meeting is everything and your ability to to kind of captivate them and make them feel good about it and make

Corey 1:21:34

make them want to be in those meetings is huge.

Corey 1:21:37

And I actually think if,

Corey 1:21:39

if, if you're listening and you don't actually know a lot of politicians, politicians

Corey 1:21:43

politicians are funnier, more charming than you think. Um,

Corey 1:21:47

Um, because that's how they get into the jobs in the first place. It's, it's actually something that doesn't necessarily come through, through mass media and social media and all of the other channels that are available, but one

Corey 1:22:02

generally charming funny people carter

Zain 1:22:06

overrated underrated charm or charisma charm and or charisma let's put it together what's your take underrated

Carter 1:22:13

underrated i agree with cory everything that cory said but it's it's not as important as being the host of one of the top-rated political podcasts in

Carter 1:22:21

in in canada so i

Zain 1:22:22

i mean i i would i would leave in a heartbeat if If Keith Urban wanted me on tour, we're going to leave it there. That's a wrap on episode 1004 of The Strategist. My name is Zane Belgy. With me, as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter, and we'll see you next time.

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