After my first year of studying political science, I returned to my home with a renewed passion for politics and a desire to apply what I had learned to a real election. Lucky for me, I had come home in the midst of the provincial election and happened to know the candidate running for the NDP. He offered me a position on his team to advise how to attract youth voters and to manage his social media presence. I was thrilled to accept, as Ramsey Hart is a well-known activist for indigenous rights, social rights and the environment in my town.
However, we were campaigning for the NDP in a massive rural riding in Eastern Ontario that has never voted for anyone other than The Conservative Party since it's creation. The NDP were doing better than ever in Ontario, both due to the leadership of Andrea Howarth and the declining Liberal Party. Carried on that tide of interest in the NDP, I worked with Ramsey on Town Hall meetings, a Meet-and-Greet, a live stream and promotional video. The meet-and-greet, live stream and promotional video were all my ideas and garnered a decent amount of attention in the local area, with the video reaching nearly 3000 people on Facebook alone. He was particularly concerned with reaching out to young people, since they traditionally tend towards the NDP, as we saw in the readings for POLI 308.
While Ramsey did not win the elections, he gained 30.5% of the vote and was second in the riding. For an NDP candidate, this is unheard of in our riding. I certainly saw first hand how the general tendencies of a party and global perception of them affect the vote much more than the actual policies in the party platform. However, I would like to believe that the work our team put into creating an effective campaign for Ramsey also helped to push him to the forefront of the election in our riding.
I learned about the internal workings of campaigning, the importance of communication and the realities of Canadian provincial politics.