In high school, a group of us decided to throw a wrench into a school election.
The year before, one of us had created the somewhat sacrilegious “Vote for Jesus” campaign, partially to poke fun at his brother who was running for SRC President. While some people within the student body found it hilarious, it drew the ire of school administration and got him in trouble. So naturally, the next step was to pick a real candidate and run a satirical campaign for him. We picked a guy who was well known for not caring very much about the school at all, and then ran a joke campaign that we thought was thoroughly funny. It got him second place, and started a conspiracy theory about voting irregularities - some people thought that the vote was rigged and our man actually won, but that people in charge didn’t want to give the prize to the joke candidate.
Which is to say we unintentionally predicted the current state of politics.
I don’t want to be unnecessarily mean to my high school friend and compare him to Doug Ford or worse – he remains my friend, after all – but the campaign was a success for the same reason that Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives have the worst leader they could have selected and the United States of America has their own terrible mistake. We appealed to a voting block that people tend to ignore, the people who don’t really feel like they’re well represented anyway so they might as well vote for someone funny. We specifically went after the misfits, the indifferent, the people with no real interest in the SRC or what they did. The people who mostly delight in ruining the day of people who actually care.
These campaigns do not exist because anybody within the campaign believes that the person they are putting forward as a candidate is actually good at their job. That’s why they’re so hard to fight against, you’re not actually fighting a traditional campaign, between two people who have different ideas about how to improve the country, but otherwise have a genuine interest in improving the nation. You can’t fight it by saying the person will be bad at their job, because that’s almost the point.
It’s an act of rebellion. If you believe you’re never going to be represented by people in charge anyway, might as well make their lives more difficult and show that you don’t take them seriously. What better way to do this than to make them fight an obvious joke? In extreme circumstances, you might even force them to work with and support an obvious joke, making it clear that they’re clinging desperately to power rather than showing any interest in improving their nation.
These campaigns have an important message behind them, you can’t assume that the best choice is going to win. You can’t get complacent. You can’t just treat a joke candidate as a joke that’s just going to go away. No, you have to figure out how to make people care, and give them a stake in their school, their province, their nation. People clearly want to break things that they see as not helping them. We have to figure out how to make them want to fix those things.
