I’ve long suspected that the Voice’s Mark Pack doesn’t need to sleep and his clear thinking after a long electoral night kind of backs up my theory. As my neural pathways crumble from lack of sleep, he has already put together five lessons we should learn from both Obama’s win and Romney’s loss.
He talks about the important of the non white male vote. While Romney might have done well amongst white men, he lost many other important groups of voters, including women, who make up the majority.
Mark also made a good point about the many emails which came out of the Obama campaign asking us to do stuff rather than read stuff. This is something they’ve continued from 2008 when they allocated people calls and sent out an email saying, basically, that if you didn’t do them and Obama lost, it would be your fault. It was a bit like the letter Chris Rennard used to write and leave for people who wanted to sit down on polling day at a by-election. You know, the one where he talks about losing Richmond by a few hundred votes and how bad would we feel if it happened again. It was supposed to make push through the pain and it usually worked, even if muttered a few epithets about him under your breath.
Mark’s view:
I cannot vote in US elections. I cannot donate to US campaigns. Yet Mr Obama kept on wanting me to do things. Phone, donate, visit, donate, tweet, donate, Facebook, donate. And donate. He almost never told me about what he believes; he repeatedly asked me to do things.
Compare that to the sorts of emails UK political parties predominantly send out. They tell you about how wonderful they, their leaders and their policies are. Or, for a more lively message how awful the other parties, their leaders and their policies are.
When Tim Farron and Paddy Ashdown get wind of this, there will be no stopping them. We’ll be getting emails telling us to knock on 300 doors before lunch.
You can read the whole piece here.
* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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6 Comments
Caron, actually the letters and e-mails urging last minute help to make the difference were based on West Derbyshire 1986 when we lost by 100 votes, 18896 to 18796. I said afterwards, ‘the people have spoken, the bastards’
Chris Rennard has kind of beaten me to it, but I was going to say the result in Richmond you’re referring to was when we lost by 74 in the 1983 General Election. To this day people are still torturing themselves with the thought of how they could have found those people
Thanks for that, Chris and Martin. There really is nothing worse than losing an election by a whisker and it’s something you want to avoid at all costs. I will never forget Chris’ letter. I read it in Littleborough and Saddleworth when I was actually exhausted and the adrenaline it created helped give me the energy to go out again (and be chased down the street by a couple of Labour thugs).
Though I’d read Mark’s experience in the light of this: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/11/07/when-quants-tell-stories/ The Obama campaign was very good at tailoring emails to their recipients, so it’s quite possible that he didn’t get emails asking for his vote because they knew that wouldn’t work.
Maybe there’s a lesson here beyond the best way of winning elections – that politicians shouldn’t be assuming a passive electorate which may or may not vote for them, but motivating individual and community action.
As interesting as why Obama won an election against the tide is why Romney failed when it was there for the taking
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/11/07/why-romney-lost-conservative-commentary-roundup/