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Posted Oct 14, 2010, 6:38 AM
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Join Date: Jun 2010
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A nice short article on the meteoric rise of one Naheed Nenshi ...
Quote:
From back of the pack to a real contender
Surging in polls, Naheed Nenshi has momentum
Published October 14, 2010 by Trevor Scott Howell in News
Third place. It’s certainly not the most coveted spot of any election race. But by mid-summer, it was the goal for Calgary mayoral hopeful Naheed Nenshi.
The Mount Royal University professor knew he had his work cut out for him just to place third. He didn’t have the face or name recognition of rival candidates Barb Higgins and Ald. Ric McIver. And early polls placed him dead last in the race.
But throughout the summer, Nenshi and his campaign team had been slogging it out. First, by gaining traction online using Twitter and Facebook. His team of eight researchers churned out policies called ‘Better Ideas.’ An army of 500 volunteers plastered the city with Nenshi lawn signs.
By mid-September, their work had paid off. A poll declared Nenshi in third spot. So, the team aimed for second. And now, with only days until the October 18 election, a new poll has him neck and neck with McIver and Higgins.
“The strategy we wrote right at the beginning, envisioned pretty much everything up till today,” says Nenshi. “And the shocking thing is that it has gone so perfectly, exactly as planned.”
A large part of that “strategy” was to publicly attack his opponents, chipping away at their past political records, or lack thereof, during mayoral forums. He came out swinging at the first forum on August 12 in Forest Lawn. While his rivals were playing it safe by sticking to their scripts and vague platforms, the Harvard graduate went on the attack.
“If we really look at the record, we see there's not much difference between Ald. Hawkesworth, Ald. Connelly and Ald. McIver,” Nenshi told the crowd.
Off in a corner his campaign director, lawyer Chima Nkemdirim, iPhone in hand, quickly tweeted the campaign’s account: “#yycvote Nenshi points out that hawksworth, mciver and connelly voted to gut plan-it in a backroom deal with the developers.”
It may seem insignificant to tweet with a maximum of 140 characters during the dog days of summer, but this was an integral part of Nenshi’s plan: Connect and lock-in the support of the politically hyper-engaged using social media tools and small informal meetings. The point? Win the younger Internet-savvy crowd over and hope they spread the word to their families, friends and colleagues.
“Everyone else said ‘Those 18-year-olds on Twitter and Facebook, no one cares about them,’” says Nkemdirim. “There are 600,000 in Calgary on Facebook. The average age of a person on Facebook is 35. We understood that and it has really worked to our advantage.”
The campaign’s legion of Facebook fans and Twitter followers grew in size and fervour — certainly more popular than any of Nenshi’s rivals. The Twitter hashtag #yycvote has largely become an echo chamber for Nenshi supporters — swarming like protective bees when their candidate is criticized. And yet, doubt still lingered about the effect this would ultimately have on election results.
“The biggest fallacy about this, and the place in which every single political scientist commenting on it has been wrong so far, is that they think people who are online are 18-year-old layabouts who will click a ‘Like’ button on a Facebook page and do nothing else,” says Nenshi. “They could not be more wrong.”
The campaign buzz gradually seeped into mainstream Calgary, and people began to embrace the campaign colour, with purple signs popping up on residential lawns and people wearing purple T-shirts and buttons. The campaign is now dubbed The Purple Revolution.
OTHER MAYORAL CANDIDATES
One undisputed election fact is that Nenshi — more than any other mayoral candidate — has pulled ahead from the bottom ranks at an astonishing rate. So, why haven’t his rivals gained as much steam?
For starters, early front-runners Ald. Ric McIver and TV news anchor Barb Higgins didn’t show up at so-called all-candidates’ forums. McIver had said he had prior commitments, usually fundraisers, and sometimes Higgins didn’t provide a reason.
Until September, McIver and Higgins were fairly low-key, except when McIver announced his candidacy with a splashy fundraiser attended by several hundred well-heeled businesspeople, land developers and influential political strategists — Calgary’s movers and shakers. The controversial alderman had a comfortable lead in an early poll — 30 points ahead of his nearest rival — until Higgins threw her hat into the ring on July 28.
When most mayoral hopefuls announced their candidacy, they didn’t have a clear, detailed platform. But as weeks passed, they rolled out specifics, typically issuing press releases, hoping their messages would get media play.
Ald. Bob Hawkesworth differentiated his campaign by stating he is not in favour of an airport tunnel, proposing to have buses shuttle travellers to and from the airport. Former oilman Wayne Stewart announced if he were elected, he would bring Calgary back to Olympic glory with a successful 2022 games bid. Ald. Joe Connolly promised to usher in a new era of democracy by using crowd sourcing to gather citizens’ ideas. And former alderman Jon Lord stumped a Triple E government: efficient, effective and ethical.
Higgins’s campaign went off the rails early last month, when she admitted to dropping “the ball internally, here,” by missing a key economic forum, then turfing her manager, Donn Lovett. She seemed to bounce back, holding her own forums in rented community halls, often not inviting the media and simply talking to voters. (Higgins did not respond to several requests for an interview.)
McIver has run a fairly low-key campaign, staying out of the limelight, while holding several fundraisers. Just days after Nenshi released a list of donors contributing to his campaign, McIver followed suit with his list — revealing many contributions are from land developers and house builders. Containing exact donation amounts next to contributors’ names, McIver’s list was far more detailed than Nenshi’s, which had only names and their vague donations — for example, a list of those who gave between $1,000 to $2,499 and others between $2,500 to $5,000, etc.
By and large, most mayoral candidates have been singing from the same song sheets: efficient snow removal; an accountable, transparent city council; better transportation; providing more arts and culture — all this, while keeping taxes under control. With candidates making similar promises and espousing similar ideas, this election may not be about issues.
“It has looked for a very long time as not so much an issues’ race, as a character or leadership race,” says Lori Williams, a political scientist at Mount Royal University. “An outsider who succeeds in persuading enough voters that they can do this differently will be appealing to a lot of people.”
A TURNING POINT
That “outsider” may be Nenshi. The first thing he did “differently,” setting his campaign apart from others, was that he challenged the police department, issuing a press release on September 23 that criticized McIver’s stance on the police budget. Nenshi questioned the size of the police budget and the city’s cost per officer.
Police Chief Rick Hanson quickly responded with his own press release, calling Nenshi’s numbers “inaccurate,” and the line of questioning “ill-informed” and “irresponsible.” (Hanson has since refused to publicly comment on the matter.)
The short-lived dust-up between Nenshi and the chief catapulted and solidified Nenshi’s campaign, turning him into a real contender.
“The fact that a police chief would come out and respond to something he had said made him look like someone who had a shot at the mayor’s chair,” says Williams.
Nenshi likely didn’t win any votes among the law-and-order crowd, nor did he score points with several mayoral rivals who responded by staunchly defending the chief and his police force.
The incident, says McIver, proves that Nenshi doesn’t have the political chops to run a city.
“He has no direct experience and he’s never run a municipality, and he hasn’t come up through the ranks like I have, ” says McIver. “He’s a good guy; he’s just not ready for this job.”
Yet, it was at this juncture that Nenshi claimed third spot in the polls; And it was at this point that he was gunning for second place.
ATTACKS FROM BELOW
Some candidates, miffed that they had been eclipsed by Nenshi, started taking potshots. City hall veteran and mayoral candidate Ald. Bob Hawkesworth created a Facebook page, called Know Nenshi, and posted edited video clips of Nenshi allegedly stating he’d sell Enmax for $1 billion — well below its reported value.
“All I’ve done is let people know what he has said and drawn attention to his words,” says Hawkesworth. “I’ll let people decide for themselves about Mr. Nenshi.”
The issue was fought out in a whirlwind of press releases by the Hawkesworth and Nenshi camps — the latest one sent out by Hawkesworth on October 5, accusing Nenshi of defamation.
“Not only are these statements by Naheed Nenshi defamatory and damaging to my reputation, they are an attempt to cover up Mr. Nenshi’s repeated public statements that he would sell off Enmax,” Hawkesworth stated.
Nenshi scoffs at the idea of selling the public utility, calling Hawkesworth’s tactics “unbelievably irresponsible”; the actions, he says, represent what people loathe about politics.
“Here is a completely irrelevant candidate to this election, sitting at spitting distance of zero in the polls and attempting to ruin everything else for everyone for no particular reason,” he adds.
Days after making the defamation accusation, Hawkesworth conceded he has no chance of winning the election. "I'm not going to be Calgary's next mayor, barring some kind of miracle between now and next Monday," he told volunteers and the media last Tuesday. The following day, Hawkesworth threw his support behind Higgins.
AIMING FOR THE NO. 1 SPOT
Spurred by a recent surge in polls, Nenshi is now serious about clinching the top spot (a Leger Marketing poll released October 13 had McIver at 33 per cent, Higgins at 30 per cent and Nenshi at 30 per cent — that’s compared to a September 19 Leger poll, which had McIver at 42.8 per cent, Higgins at 28.2 per cent and Nenshi at 8.2 per cent).
“The only fear that we have right now is that we might run out of runway,” he says. “If this election were a month from now, I would win in a landslide because of the momentum.”
In the last week of campaigning, mayoral candidates continue to roll out their platforms.
On October 11, Higgins pledged to “open up city hall” with transparency. “There should be nothing hidden and nothing to hide,” she said.
And on October 12, Lord said city hall must grapple with sustainability planning. “This is an issue that needs to be tackled as a priority for the new council, and as mayor, I have a plan to do it,” he said.
Communication in this election has been a key element — something that the Nenshi camp understands and has capitalized on: For weeks, his communication director, Stephen Carter, has been sending daily emails to media, aggressively attacking municipal issues, sometimes criticizing mayoral rivals and their platform ideas.
Nenshi’s meteoric rise in the polls is “absolutely astonishing,” says Williams. However, much of his support rests with younger voters, who historically shy away from the ballot box.
“If he actually gets them out to vote and there are enough of them, it could push him over the top,” says Williams. “At this point it really depends on whose people show up at the ballot box.”
Gaining so much momentum, Nenshi plans to stay the course.
"We're just going to keep on doing what we do," Nenshi says, referring to the final days of the race. "My path forward is very straightforward: Have more people hear my message."
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