Well, another civic election season has come and gone, and I have to say it was a doozy. The most surprising event was the steady climb in support for young mayoral candidate Noah Redden, who started out with just four per cent public support in September but had reached a solid 14 per cent support in October.

On election day, Redden nearly came in second, less than one percentage point behind Kevin Klein, an experienced politician.

Indeed, the 27-year-old’s accomplishment was nothing short of astonishing. Particularly given that his shoestring campaign was given very little coverage — largely, according to one pundit, because he didn’t send out any press releases.

This when Redden’s unwritten press releases were there for everyone to see on Instagram, as he popped up in locations across the city, posting videos about what he hoped to achieve as mayor.

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It has been quite a week. First we had “Lula” – Luiz Inácio da Silva (as nobody but his mother ever called him) – defying everybody’s expectations. After winding up two million votes behind his challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, in the first round of the Brazilian presidential election, he made a “miraculous” comeback in the second.

It was like a man going into a revolving door behind you and coming out in front. At the end of the first round, Lula was two million votes behind; at the end of the second round on Oct. 25 he was four million votes ahead. So how did he win a fourth term without cheating?

That’s what Bolsonaro claims he did, having fled to the United States; Trump, Flávio’s mentor, hints at the same. But Lula’s victory was not miraculous. He only learned to read when he was 10, and at 80 he still refused to have a mobile phone. His team finally made him get one and use it.

He wouldn’t do social media videos, so they created a WhatsApp channel called Lula’s Army, and made him appear on it at least daily. The channel went from zero to 10.8 million viewers in two weeks, and Lula won.