Traditional campaigning techniques have run their course.  We need to try something new, argues Peter Watt

As a model, voter identification has served Labour well over the years. At its most basic, we aim to find our supporters, and theirs. We can then target resources at those voters who we would like to be ours. From the early days of mail-merging targeted messages to sophisticated digital print, voter ID was the building block that delivered.

Recently, though, there has been a revival of interest in the way that we campaign. It has been bubbling for a time as politics and politicians have sunk lower and lower in people’s estimation. Turnout has been falling and results becoming more unpredictable. This was brought into sharp focus recently at the Bradford West debacle where we failed to notice that we were going to get hammered until it was too late. At Progress annual conference this year Ed Miliband said: ‘I am committing today that we will embark on the biggest drive to register new voters in a generation. In the coming years, we should knock not just on the doors of people we already know vote Labour, but also on people we haven’t contacted for years.’

So there is very definitely a mood for changing the way that we campaign, but what might that actually mean?

The first challenge has to be the whole notion of ‘voters’. It is how we think of people: ‘Labour voters’, ‘weak or strong Labour voters’, ‘Tory voters’, ‘non-voters’, ‘general election-only voters’ and so on. But people are not ‘voters’ at all. Voting is a behaviour, something that people do or do not do.

Some people choose to vote, others do not. Some people always vote, others sometimes forget. But having categorised them on the basis of this one type of behaviour we make some very dangerous assumptions about what that means in terms of their interests: ‘Liberal Democrat voters will be interested in constitutional reform and the environment’; ‘Labour voters will be interested in unemployment and social justice’. And on the basis of this assumption we further presume that we can communicate to them about these interests. And that if we do so, they will then be motivated to support the party that best reflects their interests.

But simply categorising people on this basis is clearly nonsense. It is a classic case of us as political obsessives imposing on others our own world view. We believe that the act of voting and of choosing who to vote for is hugely significant, and so we impose this significance on others. But because we attach so much significance to our reasons for what makes us Labour rather than, say, Tory we similarly assume the same motivations in others. We might think that private education is bad so assume that anyone who chooses to vote Labour does as well. Or because we might think that immigration is a good thing, therefore so do all strong Labour voters.

But in reality these are dangerous assumptions to make. People – not voters – are complex and have complex motivations. It might be convenient to pretend that we can understand people’s motivations simply by categorising them on the basis of their voting habits but the convenience does not make it right. Fewer and fewer voters are, in reality, as tribal as we are, and even those who, like us, always vote Labour will not necessarily share our reasons for doing so.

People vote, or do not vote, for many different reasons: habit, convenience of the polling station, because their mates do or do not, because it is cool or not cool, anger, tradition, a sense of duty or guilt. And they equally choose who to vote for, for a whole variety of different reasons – again, habit, family, friends, rebellion, passion, self-interest, because everyone else seems to be (or seems not to be), or random choice. In other words, nine million people or so may have voted Labour at the last election but that does not mean that they all did so because they loved Gordon Brown or thought that Labour had the best policies. In fact, most could probably not accurately cite Labour policy and, far from making rational choices, they make choices based on gut feeling.

And yet still the basic building blocks of our campaigning are all predicated on assuming similar motivations all associated with someone’s voting intention. Furthermore, we allow ourselves to believe that the very best people to persuade others to vote or stay voting Labour are Labour party activists. We have a rather sweet belief that if we look sincerely into the eyes of a stranger whose door we have just knocked on and say, ‘Labour will make your life better – honestly’ that they will believe us. In fact, with the reputation of politics so low, activists are probably the worst advocates possible for their party.

We therefore need to be radical in our campaigning and try something different. We should start by deciding that categorising everyone by their voting intention is of limited value. Many people will vote or not irrespective of anything that we do, but others are open to persuasion and so we need to identify those who actually have the influence to persuade them. I do not necessarily mean people with formal positions but people with social influence, those people in every area, in every street, who are the ‘go-to’ people. They are the people that everyone else trusts and whose opinion is sought and listened to. They could be the neighbour, the pub landlord, the shopkeeper or the postman. But they could equally be someone in the street, block or office that is simply trusted. They know what is going on and who is who. They are probably not formally the secretary or chair of anything but they are out there, thousands and thousands of them, and they matter.

So we need to find them and begin to get to know them. We have to see if we can help them, or find out what they can tell us about what is really going on in their area. We do not need to persuade them with the brilliance of our policy because it is our instincts that will matter to them. In fact, they may not necessarily be people who identify as Labour. But they do care passionately about where they live or about their workplace. And if they decide that we are worth it then they will begin to tell others that we are. We will still need to keep leafleting and doing direct mail. In fact, our materials will be properly local and informed by our local contacts. But the vast majority of our face-to-face work will focus on building really deep relationships with our local influencers.

It will take a bit of effort, creativity and patience to find them, but find them we must. Because the alternative is that we keep pretending that people do as we have always assumed that they do: that they identify with one party or another and just need to be persuaded or reminded to ‘do the right thing’; and that we are the people to persuade them.

In our heart-of-hearts we know they do not trust us – but they just might trust their neighbour, the woman at the post office, that guy in accounts …

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Peter Watt is a contributing editor to Progress and former general secretary of the Labour party

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Photo: John Keogh