You cannot imagine, dear readers, how difficult it is, in politics, to make the electorate understand your main message, your ideas, your color. Especially between election campaigns, when citizens follow very little political news.
This is why Catherine Dorion offered Québec solidaire a dream opportunity. His victory in Taschereau in 2018, the historic stronghold of the PQ, was nothing short of brilliant – 8,500 majority votes! —, as was the progression of QS, from 4 to 10 deputies.
The key to this success? The primovotants, these young people who present themselves for the first time at the polls. We have good reason to think that 40% of them voted QS in 2018. With this in mind, we can hypothesize the following: Quebec producing 80,000 new adults each year (therefore 80,000 new people of to vote), if the Solidaires succeeded in capturing 40% of them year after year, they would ensure a constant increase in their electoral base and would sail towards success.
There are obviously several young people: 60% did not vote QS. I once visited a training center where young people were learning to install charging stations for electric cars. I asked them if they were looking forward to owning one of these cars. None raised their hands. “They’re more interested in Rams,” their teacher told me. I don’t think they voted QS.
Nevertheless. How do you keep the 40% who are rebellious, anti-establishmenteco-awakened, coined the slogan “ fucking all” and found it funny to Tweeter “OK boomer”? Isn’t it by having in his team a figure who multiplies the blows of brilliance and who enrages the mononcles and the aunts? Dorion, thanks to his originality and the repetition of his anti-conformist message, has achieved this feat. And you could think that, each time she was denounced by Mario Dumont and Denise Bombardier, she scored points. If my mother is offended, the young rebels may think, we’re on the right track.
MNA Dorion had understood this mechanism well. After the controversy over his presence in the Assembly in cotton, his supporters launched the #MonCotonOuatéMonChoix movement on the Web, to play judo with the debate. This movement – which someone called “cotton cotton” – had a real echo on Twitter and Facebook, in the newspapers and on the radio.
When she dressed up for Halloween as a posh congresswoman in a business suit, black stockings and a short skirt (which I found amusing), columnist Denise Bombardier accused her of being, I quote, “the ‘sulphurous muse of the crazy and feminist left’. MP Dorion responded by wearing a t-shirt bearing Bombardier’s phrase. (It’s still on sale at Mercerie Roger.) An excellent shot. When she compared adding a freeway to high that a line of coke provides, so short and addictive, it hit the mark, except among the stuck.
“I am overwhelmed by her extraordinary ability to arouse interest, to capture the attention of the media,” wrote Mario Dumont in 2019. “The level of visibility she has achieved is enough to make most of the deputies of The national assembly. The member’s activity has certainly made some of her caucus colleagues grumble. It doesn’t matter in the slightest. The only question is whether these controversies allow him to be heard and to be adopted… by his target electorate.
Hope was allowed. But the first disappointment appeared at the time of the partial held in December 2019 in Jean-Talon. QS’s decision to make the election a referendum against the third link, to unite environmentalists, was good. The result was inversely proportional to expectations: the QS electorate fell by two percentage points, from 19.2% in 2018 to 17% in 2019. Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois gave this testimony of the Dorion effect in the door-to-door: “We heard about it from both sides, sometimes negatively, but also sometimes positively, and then roughly in similar proportions. But a party only targets in a campaign the voters most likely to vote for it. GND therefore informed us that, in the supportive and related electorate, Dorion harmed as much as it helped. Ultimately, very bad news.
I don’t know if the QS politburo has polls done. But it is clear that the party leadership determined, as early as the fall of 2019, that the Dorion effect was counterproductive. His decision to ban the congresswoman from appearing at the solidarity convention that fall was unprecedented.
How, if not, to measure the Dorion effect? By the time the elected official knew her maximum exposure, at the end of 2019, QS had its worst poll since the election. A loss among the oldest could be accepted, but only if the gain among the youngest was considerable. But there was a decline in all age groups.
Since the MP is more discreet (a cumulative effect of the pandemic and a recent six-month maternity leave), the party’s voting intentions have reverted to where they were before.
We can draw the conclusion that the proportion of young people who are receptive to Dorion’s nonconformist message is much more limited than one might have thought. If that’s true for Dorion, it’s also true for QS’s radical positions in general, which is not good news for the party’s ability to grow. Marie-Victorin’s partial will give us a new indication of this. But it is with a pang of heart that I observe the failure of the Dorion effect. Sincerely, at a time when the former red square Nadeau-Dubois looks more and more like a business executive, I hoped our youth would be a little more attracted by the turbulent irreverence embodied by Dorion.
See, I miss her already!
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