Election Season round two!
With the end of the Provincial Election and the start of the Federal Election Manitobans have been inundated with messaging which has ultimately led to their choice on who to vote for. This Tuesday many of us hit the polls and marked our ballots for the candidate that we believed had the best vision on where we see Manitoba going in the future.
While reviewing the election coverage we thought it may be interesting to get an outside set of eyes to look at the election messaging and the final results. So we sent some materials from the pre and post media coverage to Bob Raleigh of PathSight Predictive Science, a Connecticut company who specializes in understanding why people vote like they do. What we got was a different point of view that gave us some food for thought and clues as to what we might expect to see in the next round of the federal election….
Read on and share your thoughts in the comments below!
From PathSight Predictive Science:
“Every time there is an election there is a moment in time where most of us collect our breaths and try to figure out what it all means to us going forward. Rather than try to go through the myriad of campaign promises made in the heat of a summertime special election, it may be more useful to think about what the results of the election say about the electorate rather that the candidates. The results are a moment in time to look at the direction that was offered to the province as we take an honest look at what it says about Manitobans and the electoral process. Here are three immediate take a ways to begin to make sense of this election.
- The Conservative Progress party won a second successive majority government. The platform and policies of the PC’s appeal to folks who are looking for definition: definition of cost, definition of revenue (taxes) and definition of where it will take us. People like that are relying on their instincts for a natural order in life. Leadership that fills that void will draw on a tradition of putting outcome over process, putting our culture over the individual and expecting a degree of conformity along the way.
- The NDP, Liberal and Green parties offered a counteroffer that in combination was fragmented by comparison. In times of transition and change people are less likely to bet on the future without a clear pathway to success. With the NDP’s success at adding to their seat totals, there is reason to be optimistic, but there wasn’t an appetite for enough of the electorate to reject the CP’S clear messaging as to the way forward. To be successful in that vein would require an opposition party that would create a vision of the future that would entice people to accept some risk to turn away from the concrete offering of their rival.
- As they say, “Winning is easy, Governing is harder”. As this moment in, time that election created a snapshot of what it takes to win. The leadership dilemma is always the same. No one has a majority of the electorate to lean on for support. To be successful, the leadership will need to continue to reach out to the electorate and convert non-believers to sign on to a different, but uniquely Manitoba vision of the future. One encouraging thing happened on election night when Premier Pallister was asked about the NDP’s net gain of seats, he responded, “I think we need to listen better. I think we need to communicate better what we’re doing and why.” If that is the Premier’s instinct going forward, it could be the definition of success.”
Bob Raleigh is the founder and managing partner of PathSight Predictive Science. Previously, he was CEO of Rockefeller Consulting and a longtime television executive at Carsey-Werner. He holds a PhD in psychology from Syracuse University.
PathSight Predictive Science arose out of 50 years of intense scientific study that included nearly 80,000 direct survey participants. The result is an extraordinary system that uses proprietary analytics and advanced machine learning to assign people into measurable “Instinctual Patterns”. These are stable and stunningly accurate predictors of a person’s thoughts, beliefs and actions across any number of human activities.
It’s why people do what they do.
More from Bob Raleigh:
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