Is Poilievre's playbook crumbling before his eyes?

During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, progressives online, preaching a sunny message, generated a collective 1.5 billion views across all platforms, according to one count generated by the FWIW newsletter.

- COLIN HORGAN

It was “a huge shift” — primarily because it’s been a long time since the internet has been a positive, even fun, place to be.

In recent years, the social internet has become more right-wing and, at the same time, darker, angrier, and more confusing. It’s a tone that more Canadians are seeing reflected now in their own political sphere and that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has adopted to boost his populist message. But weeks from the U.S. election, and with a Canadian vote possible at any time, we sit astride a tonal edge — a divide made even more striking during the closing arguments of Tuesday’s presidential debate, when Kamala Harris appealed to the “the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the ambitions of the American people” and Donald Trump called the United States “a failing nation … in serious decline” that is “being laughed at all over the world.”

Harris’s capture of the positive online discourse suggests that this upbeat, hopeful vibe — the likes of which we haven’t seen online in a decade — might once again be ascendant, and not just in the U.S. If it bears out, it could mean Poilievre’s online gambit, and his entire messaging strategy, is riskier than it looks. Harnessing a political future to an online vibe, no matter how strong it may appear in the short term, is a fundamental messaging mistake. And Poilievre should know it is. After all, it’s a mistake Justin Trudeau made, too.

Trudeau’s rise to prominence coincided with what was an apex of the progressive-leaning social web. When Trudeau began his campaign to become prime minister, social media tended to reflect broadly progressive values. His personality and his message proved to be good content for the era. He was, to put it in social media parlance of the era, very upworthy, and his climb up the Liberal party coincided with the last days of positive clickbait.