Sir Osis of Liver 🇨🇦 🇲🇽 on Nostr: Proxies certainly played a part in their strategy. PP had also been in campaign mode ...

Proxies certainly played a part in their strategy.

PP had also been in campaign mode for about a year and a half prior to the writ dropping. Anti-woke stuff and hob-knobbing with bad actors on the extreme end of the right wing and the "trucker" protest organizers, the Jordan Peterson "interview" while avoiding the legitimate press, and such. All aimed at securing the right flank from the PPC. The rest of their narrative was constant attacks on Trudeau.

That could have been effective, had facts on the ground remained constant. The problem was that they didn't. Trudeau left and was replaced by super-serious candidate Carney, throwing all that groundwork out the window.

But people aren't likely to forget all that once into the campaign and PP attempted to moderate the messaging. PP had defined himself, and it wasn't going to appeal to moderates and certainly to left leaning voters. There was a brief clip of a 94 year old dyed-in-the-wool conservative who'd voted that way all the way back to George Drew in 1953. She said she was voting Liberal for the first time in her life because she just couldn't vote for that nasty man.

The old rule of thumb was to keep your powder dry until the writ drops. Have occasional fund raisers, do the glad-handing, listen for feedback, keep it vague, and low key, that sort of thing. The key campaign issues quite often reveal themselves only after it's underway. Money and effort spent before that can be a complete waste.