Counsel PA

Welcome to our series of Policy Conversations between Counsel Public Affairs Senior VP John Delacourt and Counsel PA Account Director Will Shelling about the 2024 US presidential election. John is a veteran Liberal strategist, longtime Policy contributor and novelist, and Will is a Vegas-raised, Vancouver-based NDPer. 

In their final Conversation of this series, Shelling and Delacourt sift through the entrails of a campaign that, against all reason, conventional wisdom and voter self-interest nevertheless produced the strangely predictable outcome of a second Trump presidency. Here are John Delacourt and Will Shelling with Policy Conversation: Election 2024 and the Revenge of the Manosphere.

For their seventh and last Policy Conversation before election day, Delacourt and Shelling examine the state of the race in dollars, early voting numbers and GOTV ground games. Here are John Delacourt and Will Shelling with Policy Conversation: Air Wars, Ad Spend and GOTV.

In our sixth Shelling-Delacourt US election conversation, Will and John tackle the question of an apparent plateau in the Harris-Walz campaign’s momentum, and the pressure on presidential candidates to broaden their outreach avenues beyond the usual legacy-media suspects. Here’s Policy Conversation: Winning the Connection War in a Surreal Campaign.

In the fifth Policy Conversation in our series, the VP debate on October 1st in New York City between Democrat Tim Walz and Republican J.D. Vance produced a relatively civilized exchange, and one viral clip in the last five minutes. Here are Delacourt and Shelling with Policy Conversation: The VP Debate, Breaking Through the Noise, and It’s All About GOTV.

In the fourth instalment of our weekly Policy Conversation on the 2024 presidential election campaign, Delacourt and Shelling tackle the place of health care in the US campaign, the limitations of “freedom”, and the Walz vs. Vance debate, with stops along the way at Gord Downie, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Newsroom and Nickelback. Here’s Policy Conversation: Health Care, Freedom and Walz vs. Vance.

In the wake of the September 10th presidential debate at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center in which — acccording to every poll, post-mortem, and other metric of sentient discernment — Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump, Delacourt and Shelling unpack it all, from the takeaways of the event itself to the potential impact of Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris. Here’s Policy Conversation: Delacourt & Shelling on the Great Debate Divide.

As the traditional presidential election campaign homestretch delineation of Labo(u)r Day ticks by, Shelling and Delacourt examine the ways in which the Harris-Walz campaign is appealing to Gen Z voters and whether the remarkable party unity that accompanied Harris’s succession to Joe Biden can be maintained until November. Here’s Policy Conversation: Issues-Based Politics, Progressive Unity and the Meme-ification of Normal.

In their first conversation of the series, Delacourt and Shelling deconstruct the Tao of Tim Walz, the contrast his “Coach Walz” persona provides to the volatile strongman model that rationalizes a range of disruptive, norm-breaking behaviour on the part of an array of right-wing figures, and whether he can get young men into the voting booth. Here’s Policy Conversation: John Delacourt and Will Shelling on Coach Walz and the Male Voter.

John Delacourt is a Senior VP at Counsel Public Affairs. He has served in a number of portfolios in three federal Liberal governments, as well as in communications and stakeholder relations in Opposition. He is the author of five novels and a regular contributor to Policy magazine. 

Will Shelling is an account director at Counsel PA and New Democrat who specializes in justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, Indigenous affairs, climate change, and Canadian culture. He is a director for White Ribbon Canada, a national non-profit dedicated to ending gender-based violence. He was raised in Las Vegas, and now lives in Vancouver, BC.

John and Will will be conversing weekly until November.

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