“Where politicians once made church basements the fixture of their campaign road trips, the refreshment-stop of choice is no the ubiquitous Tim Hortons…Canadian politics no longer bears much resemblance to the church (except maybe the occasional sermon) but our marketing politicians seem right at home among sales posters, advertising and cash registers.”

Reading the newspaper, it would be easy to believe that politicians make judgments based on polls: 42% support for X, 27% support for Y. The truth, argues Shopping for Votes, is significantly more complicated.

As technology has improved and politicians have gotten better at identifying individual voters, the ability of political parties to target messages more precisely has also increased. Parties now divide voters into archetypes: Zoe, the yoga-loving left wing younger condo owner, or Dougie, a single tradesman who liked to hunt (both archetypes are drawn from the 2006 Conservative strategy in Canada). Zoe would never vote for the Conservatives, so could be safely ignored – Dougie was a potential supporter, and so a key target. In the event, the Conservatives managed to identify 500,000 individual voters they needed to convince to vote Conservative: the millions of others were either already voting Conservative, unlikely to ever vote Conservative, or in non-marginal constituencies. National polls of average support become totally irrelevant, even if everyday voters follow them closely.

The danger, argues Delacourt, is that as a result politics is more polarized than ever. Politicians don’t look for broad, uniting policies: they look for ones that will target their key groups, ignoring the impact or effect on others. The result is that as consumers increasingly shop for the best party, choosing not to identify with any one group, parties also shop for the right voters, offering finely tuned products to different groups. The government is no longer the home of bold national projects or grand ideas, but rather small, carefully targeted ones. As a result, creating a national brand often falls to the private sector. In Canada, that has mean Tim Hortons and Molson ad campaigns are responsible for nationalism, not the government.

It’s a powerful – and interesting – message, and one that I suspect resonates with a lot of voters. The book is a great insight into how political hacks, as opposed to voters, think about elections, and how elections are being changed by trends like big data and better econometrics. An important and useful read, and if nominally targeted towards Canada, relevant to most electoral systems.