There are any number of political reasons why Labour lost the election but we also have to question whether our organisation worked optimally – is that why we lost touch with the voters? I don’t claim to be a polling expert or to understand all the technical issues, but in some places we didn’t just lose the political arguments, we were out-organised as well.
If you examine the regional voter ID statistics you can see a relationship between contact rates and swing rates; where people did most work, it seems, the swings against Labour weren’t so bad. But the correlation is not exact. For example in Luton, both its northern and southern constituencies had mediocre voter contact rates and yet these were the seats – the only ones in the east of England – where we returned Labour MPs. The two Luton representatives and their teams were clearly working very hard and building up brilliant relationships with voters, but this didn’t reflect itself in the voter ID figures.
The principle of segmenting the electorate to find out who your supporters are is obviously fundamental for any political party and it’s becoming easier to do this as the programs to record the information have improved. The question is whether you concentrate your efforts on getting in as much as possible of the raw data (which you then exploit during a relatively short GOTV period) or whether you focus on building relationships in their wider sense.
Contacting voters on the street brings up any number of local issues and however diligent the local candidate is, there’s always something new or emerging as an issue – it could be anything from trees to traffic, noise to antisocial behaviour. If you are able to address a problem for a resident then it doesn’t mean that he or she will necessarily vote for you but it does mean that you’ll be remembered, and a relationship of trust is built upon which a conversation about politics can take place.
Prior to the election, the regional offices set voter ID targets and there were incentives for constituencies to hit these targets. I wonder whether this might occasionally have had perverse consequences. As supporters and candidates we spent a lot of time dashing around recording information but those electors who wished to spend longer talking about local issues could sometimes be overlooked.
New possibilities are opened up by Labour’s recent increase in membership, and significant numbers of the new members seem to be young, keen and ready for hard work. We already expect candidates to work impossibly hard and perhaps rather than putting all the burden on candidates we could see our volunteers as caseworkers too, involved in investigation and follow-up, writing to officials, and the all-important feedback to residents?
In that sense we perhaps need to break down the division between candidates and supporters, between voter ID and community politics, to revitalise ourselves organisationally as well as politically. One thing won’t change – we’ll never outspend the Tories. But with Cameron already looking shaky, the Lib Dems in the doldrums and soon, a new leader, if we work a bit smarter we can make this a one-term government.