Campaigning & Candidates

We can’t fight everywhere at once, so we need to choose carefully. The best places to start will have:

• Council elections most years, so candidates can be seen again and again
• A real electoral opportunity, based on many parameters: analysis of where other parties are weakest, how people in a constituency vote, demographics etc
• Enough members nearby to support a campaign

Ideally we’d build clusters: council candidates and a parliamentary candidate working the same area together, so each helps the other become known.

We’ll hone the model in a few places, then roll it out, with support for new teams as they form. We have to build as fast as possible, but also be realistic about resources.

Some of our best future candidates are already members. Many have never thought of standing. Others are already getting things done in their communities: running clubs and charities, sitting on school boards, building small businesses, fixing things because nobody else would.

Independent councillors are looking for a political home, and councillors are leaving other parties. Some already share our outlook, and a councillor who joins us brings experience, a local record and a seat. But we have to check the fit: the wrong defections can be worse than no defections. In time, as the party grows, sitting MPs may look for a better home too. Same applies to them.

Behind all of this we need a proper candidate pipeline: an internal pathway for members, outside scouting, and recruitment, vetting, training and selection.

Again, nothing is isolated. We have to make sure we are attracting members in volume, but also sending up a flare for people who want to become a public servant in their community. So communications and membership work feeds in here too.

Candidates need to be seen in their communities all year round. That takes time, and nobody can do it alone. So every candidate needs support around them:

• A team, with a campaign manager running the project and keeping everyone going
• Training, so they know the politics as well as what works and what the rules are in campaigning (the start of an SDP University)
• Tools and materials, from leaflets to postal vote letters, to checklists – so nobody starts from scratch
• Money, raised and spent where it makes the most difference

Running for office is hard. Morale matters as much as leaflets, and candidates and campaign managers/teams will ideally partner for the long haul.

Above all, campaigns have to build real connections in the community, and keep them going between elections.

There is a caveat to this point, that once again points to how everything is interlinked and must be built as a whole: a nationally known party can speed this up by years. Local candidates have all felt the sting of years of hard work being undone by a newcomer from a party with a big national reputation. So the national ‘air game’ needs to complement the ground game.

Campaigns are also how we learn. Every leaflet round, doorstep conversation and election count tells us something: what people care about, street by street, and where our votes are coming from.

Standing candidates can also get electoral data nobody else can: the electoral register, the list of postal voters and, after the election, the marked register showing who actually voted. Even a paper candidate gives us data we can use next time. By law, this electoral data is ringfenced for campaigning.

Alongside it, we can build wider qualitative and quantitative data by ward and constituency: local issues, results, demographics and what we hear on the doorstep. That we can use and leverage much more broadly across the party.

At the moment very little of this is kept or shared. We need to build a system that can securely gather, tag and use both.

The rough shape of a campaign (both the long and short campaigns) can be planned long in advance. There are key milestones and things that must be done 6-12 months before a single vote is cast.

So we can bring members into these plans. Clear, specific asks with enough notice (deliver 200 leaflets on your own street on a set weekend, help with a street stall on a fixed date) are easier to commit to and easier to keep. They will all add up.

People campaign more when they know other members locally. So the social aspect of the party has to continue and expand. We’ll talk about this more next week during Membership & Regional Growth week.