How Leslyn Lewis turned around a struggling campaign to contend for the Conservative leadership
'We could all see her potential. But the thing that's keeping her back is her campaign'
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In mid-February, about a month into the Conservative leadership race to replace Andrew Scheer, a meeting was organized in Ottawa to introduce Leslyn Lewis to pro-life members of the party’s caucus.
Lewis had entered the race as a political unknown, at least outside of Toronto. Her only experience in running for office was as a Conservative candidate in the 2015 election, filling in for a candidate who’d been ditched mid-campaign due to a bizarre scandal (this was the infamous case of the man caught peeing in a coffee mug on a hidden camera TV show.) She placed a distant second.
The February meeting was organized by Scott Hayward, co-founder of RightNow, a group that helps get pro-life politicians elected. Between MPs and staff, there were about 50 people in attendance.
Most MPs at the meeting were impressed with Lewis. But they were not impressed with her campaign, which had a skeletal team and very little money coming in. Her campaign manager at the time was rejecting all interview requests from large media outlets, saying Lewis needed more preparation.
“We could all see her potential,” said one person with direct knowledge of the meeting, but who asked not to be named. “But the thing that’s keeping her back is her campaign.”
I'm not going to win this race by being the same as everyone else
Her supporters started making calls, trying to get more people involved to help Lewis. One person who said yes was Steve Outhouse, an experienced political staffer and organizer who had previously run the 2017 leadership campaign of Pierre Lemieux.
When Outhouse joined Lewis’ team in late February, he got to work forming an outreach campaign. Lewis’ first mass fundraising email went out on March 3. A week later, Lewis came to Ottawa for a long day of interviews with newspapers and TV networks. A few days after that, Lewis had Outhouse take over the whole campaign.
Outhouse declined to comment on Lewis’ initial campaign team, but said he quickly saw there was opportunity for growth.
“Right from the beginning, people on social media were very intrigued by her,” he said. “Twitter was where she was stronger. She was running her own account and doing her own tweets. So she and I had a discussion very early on where she said, ‘You know, I’m not going to win this race by being the same as everyone else. I need to be me and I need to speak in my own voice’
They also discussed how to communicate Lewis’ views on issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
“We decided that we needed to address the social conservative angle right off the bat, because everyone knew the mood within the party,” Outhouse said. “Social conservative views had been held up as one of the main reasons Andrew had lost the last election.”
They decided Lewis should set out her specific policy views on abortion, such as banning sex-selective abortion and boosting funding for services that counselled alternatives to abortion. She believed those positions were not overly controversial among Canadians, and that by putting these views out there clearly and discussing them thoughtfully, it would defuse any accusations she had a hidden agenda.
“We knew that we were starting with that base of social conservatives, but her vision always from the start was to build broader than that, and the challenge was to see if we could,” Outhouse said.
Meanwhile, as Lewis’ profile rose, money quickly started coming in. On March 13, she met the first financial threshold of $150,000 to get access to the full party membership list. It took her just five more days to raise the second $150,000 and qualify for the final ballot.
Then, just as Lewis’ campaign was getting on a roll, the pandemic hit. The Conservative Party suspended the leadership race for a month, and pushed back the final voting day from June 27 to Aug. 21.
For a candidate with low name recognition, in-person events are very important — but travel is also very expensive. Lewis had finally gotten the money to start doing truly national tours when the pandemic suddenly made in-person events impossible.
“We were quite concerned about that,” Outhouse said. She’d done B.C., Alberta and Ontario, but hadn’t yet visited other provinces. “We were starting to work on a schedule for that, and then before we knew it, everything shut down,” he said.
But they had access to the full party membership list and now had the money to afford premium video-conferencing services, so they were able to pivot quickly and keep introducing her to potential voters.
“Ultimately, it levelled the playing field for her and she was able to connect with a lot more people in a very short period of time,” Outhouse said.
This was early spring, and he had the sense that things were going well — but it was just a sense.
“We had no polling numbers because we’d had no money to poll,” Outhouse said with a grim laugh. “It would have been helpful to know that we were going to have the money later on. But at that time we were flying blind.”
Even without polling numbers, though, there were other indications that Lewis was surging. Through volunteer surveys of party members, they were starting to identify her voters. Donations were starting to pour in, and some of the mass emails Lewis sent out were generating a huge resp
On May 14, Lewis sent out an email with the subject line “My LIFE story,” where she discussed her own decision not to have an abortion when she got pregnant while articling at a law firm. She said friends told her she’d have to choose between her career or having a baby, but she was determined to choose both — even though it did make her career path more difficult.
“My children have helped give me purpose and made me a better lawyer,” Lewis wrote. “They have shown me the power of choosing life. And they are the reason I want to fight for all the women and girls who, like me, felt immense social pressures to have an abortion.”
The email had all the hallmarks of Lewis’ campaign: it was unusually personal, but not fire-breathing or confrontational. It was very different from everything being said by other candidates.
On June 7, Lewis sent out an email with the subject line “Taking a knee” that blasted Justin Trudeau for attending the huge Black Lives Matter protest on Parliament Hill at a time when rules prevented such crowds for family gatherings, church services, weddings, and many other functions. A week later, Lewis wrote about her view of Black Lives Matters, saying she agreed with some parts of the movement but not with the proposed solutions, such as defunding police.
“Those emails hit a chord,” said Outhouse. He said this was when she really built support among a wide range of people, not just social conservatives.
My children have helped give me purpose
In the end, Lewis attracted an astonishing number of votes for a candidate who entered the race with zero profile. When Derek Sloan, the other social conservative in the race, dropped off the ballot first, the vast majority of his second-choice support went to Lewis. At that point, she actually had more overall votes than Erin O’Toole and Peter MacKay did.
But Lewis finished in third place because of the electoral point system, where all ridings are weighted equally. She won the province of Saskatchewan, but Saskatchewan only has 14 ridings. She finished far back in Quebec, which has 78 ridings. Her support was just too concentrated in the West.
Having come so close is a tough way to lose, Outhouse said. “It’s kind of like losing a hockey game by one goal instead of five,” he said. “When you lose by five, you’re like, well, there’s nothing we could really do about it.”
Still, it was an enormously successful campaign, and Lewis appears set for a bright future in the party once she decides where she’ll run in the next election.
Staff on other campaigns have lavished Outhouse with praise, saying he ran one of the best leadership campaigns they’ve ever seen. Outhouse, as is typical of his style, deflects such comments.
“I appreciate that people want to give me credit for things, but it was all Leslyn as the candidate,” he said. To the extent he’ll take credit, it’s for helping to build a team of lesser known but overachieving campaign staff (he compares it to the movie “Moneyball”) who made sure Lewis had the money and resources to get her message out.
“Ultimately, if all these people still fell in love with Leslyn and wanted to vote for her, the outcome would have been largely the same,” he said. “But the money certainly gave us options, and made sure that people would see her message.”
• Email: bplatt@postmedia.com |
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