OTTAWA—Uniting a fragmented country is Justin Trudeau’s chief job as he steps into his second mandate. How Trudeau got that national job — on the strength of 157 small, local victories — is an important story as this Liberal prime minister tries to de-fragment the nation. Governing is an art. Getting elected, in the 21st century, is increasingly a science. The question is: can Trudeau put the art and science together? The federal Liberals are in power as 2019 comes to an end thanks to what may have been one of the most sophisticated, locally targeted election campaigns this country has ever seen. “Justin Trudeau didn’t win the election. Justin Trudeau’s campaign organization won the election,” says Nik Nanos, one of Canada’s leading pollsters, who has been sifting through the results of the 2019 election and marvelling at how Liberals gathered up a national mandate with a precise focus on specific pockets of the country. Nanos believes that this national-versus-local focus raises important questions about how a Liberal minority government will patch together a pan-Canadian vision for governing. He also believes that Liberals’ growing mastery of micro-targeted campaigning will make them unafraid to plunge into another election if their new minority government collapses. To understand how Trudeau will set about uniting the country, though, you first need to know how he and his Liberal team divided it up to win. Here is that story. The man in charge of the Liberal campaign organization was Jeremy Broadhurst, a veteran of the party through good times and bad over the past couple of decades. If one accepts Nanos’s analysis of who won this election, Broadhurst is due some credit, but he modestly throws that in the direction of the troops on the ground. “In a campaign that saw an unprecedented amount of money spent in incredibly innovative ways in the digital sphere, the biggest single difference f ...
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