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Kerry-Lynne Findlay won the BC Conservative leadership last weekend. It’s always incredibly easy to dissect the why of a win after the fact, Turns out, she had already won the more important contest weeks earlier, when she set the terms for what the race was about.
Her frame was a purity test. Are you a real conservative, or a BC Liberal looking to hijack the party for political convenience?
Once that became the ballot question party members thought they were answering, every other candidate was in a bind: Accept the frame and spend the campaign proving their Conservative credentials (which of course only reinforces KLF’s ballot question), or change the ballot question, perhaps to one about experience, competence, premier-in-waiting.
Some of KLF’s competitors tried the second option and ran what amounted to a general-election campaign for an audience that had shown up to answer a different question. Competence is a fine answer. It wasn’t the answer many members wanted to give.
In almost every contested decision — a leadership race, a regulatory file, a campaign, a boardroom fight — the side that defines the question has the strongest chance of winning. As a campaigner, it can be easy to focus our energy on winning the argument, but leverage sits further upstream, in deciding which argument the electorate believes it’s having.
Failure to set the frame means you run a campaign that answers the wrong question. No matter how strong your argument, you’re losing.
Findlay didn’t manufacture the appetite for a purity test; she read that it was already there, named it, and planted her flag before anyone else thought to. The frame worked because a real constituency was waiting to answer it. Set a question nobody in the room actually wants to take up, and you’ll find yourself framing to an empty room. The best politicians hear the question the room is aching to be asked.
So the next time you’re losing and can’t work out why, stop sharpening your argument. Look at the question. There’s a good chance you’re answering one your opponent chose for you, and answering it beautifully. The work is to change that question, or to claim it before they do. Whoever owns the question rarely has to win the debate. They’ve arranged things so the debate was never really in doubt.
Findlay still has to govern a party that’s only half-sure it wanted her, which is a genuinely hard problem and a different essay. But the win itself is a lesson in the thing I spend most of my working life on. Her rivals turned up with the better résumés and some excellent answers. She turned up with the question.
