LESSONS FOR NEW DEMOCRATS FROM CHOW’S CAMPAIGN AND FIRST 100 DAYS

Jordan Leichnitz

Alongside Wab Kinew’s historic win in Manitoba, Chow’s summertime victory in Toronto is one of the great success stories for New Democrats in 2023. Her last campaign for mayor in 2014 ended in disaster when she slid from front-runner to distant third, which made this year’s victory all the sweeter.

Chow inherited a city deeply in debt, with a broken transit and housing system and a Premier who made no secret of his antipathy towards her – but has so far managed to deliver progress on key issues affecting Torontonians while deftly navigating a divided council.

Besides “have incredibly lucky vote splits”, what lessons could Chow’s campaign and first 100 days offer New Democrat leaders like Jagmeet Singh and Marit Stiles who also need to crack the code in Toronto and the GTA?

Root your campaign in authenticity rather than transaction. This was perhaps the biggest strategic distinction between Chow’s ill-fated 2014 campaign and this win. Nine years ago, Chow’s campaign tried to position her to hug the middle – be all things for all people, and smooth the sharp edges of her public personality.

When John Tory made the campaign a referendum on transit, Chow was stuck with a middling narrative and a tightly-scripted debate that sapped her of personality. Rather than centering her experience and values, her campaign undermined her confidence and made her doubt herself.

This time, it was different: early on, the campaign team made a decision to lean into her personality, elbows and all, and focus on solidifying her voice to communicate her values. Chow worried less about deep policy detail, and more about embodying the emotional core of the campaign.

The campaign team kept a tight focus on her ability to see and understand the struggles of ordinary people and her personal story as the offering to voters, rather than a laundry list of policy items. They carried the theme of speaking from the heart right down to her signs and rally handhelds, which featured little hearts. Their bet was that people who know her, like her – and that in a sleepy by-election with a heavily split field, the desire to change could motivate voters to coalesce around her.

Particularly for Singh and federal NDP, who will carry both the good and bad of their confidence and supply agreement with the Liberals into the next campaign, there are lessons here about the way voters connect with leaders over detailed policy commitments – and the dangers of a technocratic, status quo offer.

Real things for real people. In contrast to recent federal and Ontario NDP campaigns, Chow’s offer was not policy heavy. Her platform featured few surprises, and largely stuck to tangible commitments on services for Torontonians that allowed her to circle back to her vision for a better city.  Her first 100 days have followed the same pattern, addressing concrete things that matter in people’s lives – restoring cancelled TTC service, extending pool and library hours, expediting approval for sidewalk patios, and hiking the city’s vacant home tax.

Chow has always been a pragmatic progressive. She’s unafraid to champion unpopular causes when they align with her values: it took real political courage to fight for anti-homophobia curriculum in the mid-1980s as a schoolboard trustee, for example. She’s also always had a keen eye for the populist appeal in issues that might pass other New Democrats by, like the time as an MP she defended the owner of the Lucky Moose grocery store for making a citizen’s arrest of a serial shoplifter.

Chow is known within progressive circles as a passionate, hard worker; exacting, as many former staff will tell you, but driven by the concerns of regular people.  Her own background immigrating to Canada as a child and living through turbulent family struggles of resettlement and breakdown doubtless informs her tendency to stay rooted in pragmatic wins, and eschew the ideological debates that too frequently suck in other leaders on the left. This is a lesson that would be well taken by the Ontario NDP, in particular.

It’s housing, stupid. But not just any kind of housing – renters. Toronto is nearly a majority renter city, with half the population living in rental housing and dealing with punishing rent increases. City council has long been made up of majority homeowners, and debates about housing have tended to reflect homeowner concerns: zoning, property taxes and development disputes.

The Chow campaign recognized that renters were an untapped market of motivated voters who haven’t seen their concerns reflected on council, and a group who are often cross-pressured Liberal voters. She spoke directly to the experience of people who never expect to own homes in Toronto’s red-hot market with big commitments to boost rental housing and rent subsidies, and she was successfully able to define the enemy as the status-quo approach to housing.

Critically, Chow avoided getting bogged down in a debate over property taxes. This was perhaps the most remarkable part of her policy approach, given the propensity of New Democrats to dive deep into policy detail. By refusing to name a number, she was able to talk more about what could be done in the city to fix housing, and her opponents’ over-reach in attacking her (Bradford’s claim that she’d hike rates by a staggering 20%, for example) made it easier to resist the frame. In a campaign where the overwhelming feeling among voters was that the city is broken, Chow smartly bet that the best defense was a good offense, attacking the current budgeting process and pushing back on her opponents with real numbers about their records.

Jettison purity politics. Chow’s approach has prioritized finding common ground when it means delivering for people, regardless of political stripe. Most notable is her success in getting Premier Doug Ford, an erstwhile political opponent who predicted that she’d be an “unmitigated disaster” as mayor, to acknowledge the city’s structural financial problems and commit to hammering out a new deal to address them - something John Tory was never able to do.

Her council appointments showed a deft hand, rewarding her own political allies with senior roles but also bringing opponents into the heart of her administration. Chow’s approach is the complete opposite of her predecessor, who kept to a tight loyal inner circle, and the culture shift has opened the door for new coalitions to emerge around her priority policy issues.

She will undoubtedly face challenges maintaining shifting allegiances on a council that overall still leans more to the right than to the left, but it would be fair to say that Chow has set the table as favourably as possible for her priorities.

Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Progressives in Toronto didn’t just stumble on this victory, the organizing infrastructure behind it was years in the making. Organizations like Progress Toronto and the TTC Riders worked between campaigns to identify progressive voters, engage them and drive helpful narratives in key seats. They were crucial in flipping seats like Jamaal Myers in Scarborough and Amber Morely in Etobicoke-Lakeshore.

The right has long recognized that parties aren’t the only way to organize, and devoted resources to civil society to help set the table for wins – but historically, the federal and provincial NDP have relied mostly on party infrastructure for this work. In this mayoral race non-party groups built crucial groundwork for Chow to draw on, and took on Chow’s opponents so her front-runner campaign could keep punching up.

The Chow campaign’s ground game was excellent. It built on these strengths and added highly effective targeting in the suburbs, and a massive get out the vote effort for advance polls. This is the same strategy that helped push the Manitoba NDP over the top in their election; the federal and provincial NDP would be equally wise to plan for a robust get out the vote in the advance polls.

Finally, preparation for reelection also has to start from day one of a mandate. This is a truism that Chow has taken it to heart, and created dedicated role in her team for someone to track not just the individual commitments she’s accomplishing, but the overall narrative arc of her tenure. Staying grounded in the commitments and messages that got her elected will undoubtedly get tougher as time goes on, but it’s smart to build to withstand that weathering.

Chow's approach demonstrates that grounded authenticity, a focus on tangible change, and strategic collaboration can pave the way for enduring progressive victories. As New Democrats look ahead to their own uphill electoral fights, Singh and Stiles should consider lessons from her campaign and mayoralty to make real gains in Toronto and beyond.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jordan Leichnitz - Jordan Leichnitz is an Ottawa-based consultant with two decades of experience in progressive political strategy and campaigns at the federal, provincial and municipal level. She spent ten years on Parliament Hill working in senior strategy positions for four Leaders of the New Democratic Party of Canada, including serving as Deputy Chief of Staff, overseeing policy development and handling issues management for the parliamentary caucus. Since 2020, Jordan has served as the Canada Program Manager for the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a German political foundation. Jordan holds a Master's degree in Political Science from the University of Ottawa, and lives in Ottawa with her partner and two young children.

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