In the elections on May 7th, Salford Lib Dems suffered an unexpected setback. We lost one of our two councillors (I’m the one who remains), and we came third and fourth out of five in our two target wards. In all three cases, we lost to the Greens. The story was similar elsewhere in Greater Manchester.
In only one of the three wards did we face an active Green Party campaign – the other two wards (including mine, where we lost my co-councillor) were won by pretty much paper candidates.
The councillor we lost was a fantastically hard working and capable councillor, who was outstanding at proactively dealing with casework and had a great reputation in the ward. There is no sense of him having ‘lost’ the ward – others won it.
I spent most of the campaign in one of our target wards with a truly outstanding candidate. Over a few months we knocked on 3500 doors and had many conversations. We ran a fantastic textbook campaign, supporting a great community activist with a big personality.
We lost to a Green Party that has no real local presence, did little to no door knocking, and put out a small number of generic leaflets, all inferior to our own.
So, what did they have that we didn’t?
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