In any high stakes vocation there is always going to be an element of tit-for-tat brinkmanship, and politics – with all its convictions and blustered opinion – is no different. Throw the perceived omnipotence of the internet into the mix, and the most important general election in a generation, and you suddenly have an arena primed for bravado.
Although there is a clear mutual respect between the two main parties’ web teams, both within the central HQs and on the independent periphery, in recent weeks the competition for the crown of web-war winners has intensified. James Crabtree’s essay in Wired magazine on the Tories’ online capabilities brought to the surface a distinct and partisan rivalry, which is expressing itself through playful exchanges between Labour and the Tories’ web royalty on Twitter and elsewhere.
There is at least consensus that online politics has changed over the last year. No longer merely a place for personality-based bloggers to try to influence the mainstream media agenda by shouting loudly, most would now agree that, in an election year, there is the need for a smarter approach. That new approach is more organisational than communicative: it seeks to bring together activists using online tools in order to help them mobilise where the election will still be won and lost, as it always was – in the traditional battleground of face-to-face campaigning on the doorsteps and in local communities.
This new understanding, based in part on the ‘respect, empower, include’ Obama model, has led to various new quasi-autonomous initiatives, particularly among Labour activists. The LabourDoorstep Twitter hashtag provides a space for Labour activists to arrange campaigning events and to share their experiences online – and to encourage other party members to get involved. The MobMonday initiative took that practice a step further: thousands of phone calls have now been made by activists mobilising on Twitter for two hours every Monday, using Labour’s online phone bank to contact voters and record information directly into the party’s central database, Contact Creator. With Labour’s launch of a new iPhone app last month, it will be even easier for volunteers to access voter ID information wherever they are – and to canvass in marginal seats on the go.
These actions have built on the success of Labour’s MembersNet, which the party says is now used regularly by 30,000 activists – three times the number that the Tories claim use MyConservatives.com. And, most significantly, these initiatives are showing results in the real world: Labour supporters have used MembersNet to organise some 15,000 individual campaign events, and made 200,000 voter contacts per week in February alone – nearly three times as many as at a similar point during the election campaign in 2005. Meanwhile, Merlin, the Tories’ equivalent to Contact Creator, is not being deployed with anything like the frequency it might.
Labour’s use of email has also improved, and single issue campaigns like Back the Ban (fox hunting), Ed’s Pledge (climate change) and Save our Sure Start are harvesting tens of thousands of new addresses which will be invaluable come the short campaign. During that intense final push, as activists and the wider public increasingly turn their focus to the election, expect blogs like LabourList and Left Foot Forward to translate their own email databases and positions as online hubs into the real world sphere by hosting phone banking and debate watch parties.
For all the media coverage of the Conservatives’ flashy online credentials, then, it is Labour’s work that has been more strategic and thoughtful. Like the hare, the Tories raced out of the traps with supreme self-assuredness in their abilities. But hold the ‘digital election’ coronation: Labour’s considered initiatives are compounding and enabling real action on the doorsteps. It ain’t for nothing that the polls are narrowing.