Head Tale

Ryan Meili has just released the above video which captures a powerful message about his campaign and what he wants to bring (back) to the province – the NDP’s ability to tell stories that resonate with people.  

There are a lot of ways to indicate who has momentum in a leadership race – some more valid than others.

For example, if someone takes the time to watch and engage with a candidate’s social media content, that’s a tangible demonstration of interest in what a candidate has to say. If people open their wallets and donate, that’s a good indication they support a candidate in a very real way.  And if you have large numbers of people doing both things, you probably have a lot of momentum.

There are less valid ways to measure momentum (“nomentum”?) – for example, releasing polls without explaining the methodology or the margin of error or even worse, designing the poll to give a candidate the result they want.

Beyond that, polls are notoriously unreliable and getting more unreliable all the time – from Calgary to the UK to Washington DC.  There are all kinds of reasons for that but sometimes it comes down to (hypothetically) some middle-aged dude getting a robo-call from a candidate they don’t support and answering that they’re an “18-35 undecided female” so that their true support doesn’t show up when the poll results are released.  You get enough people doing that to mess with polling data (or supporters of one candidate hanging up when they hear its a call from another candidate or whatever) and the results become the definition of unreliable.

Because of that, I thought I’d do an analysis of some of the numbers that are out there that do a good job of indicating the real world support for each of the two candidates running for the Leadership of the Sask NDP.

This is important because in the past leadership race in 2013, the membership ignored these types of indicators of more widespread support and, in the case of Cam Broten, actually elected the person who was coming in third in important metrics relating to fundraising and social media reach who then led the party to…not much really.

It’s a different race with different dynamics today. But the message that these types of very real metrics send are clear indicators of who, to tie it back to Ryan’s latest video, is telling the best story – the story that people are interested in, the story that people want to engage with, the story that people are excited to hear and want to support.

To be blunt, given what happened in 2013, I firmly believe that the party ignores these metrics at their peril this time around. 🙁