A little less conversation, a little more action

Let’s do a little number crunching.

Ed Miliband wants Labour to have four million conversations with voters before May 7th.

Labour has a little over 190,000 members. If, say, a fifth of those are activists, that leaves us with around 40,000 people knocking on doors in the run up to the election. To speak to four million people, that means each of us needs to average 100 conversations before polls close. That equals five or six conversations a week.

Even if I’ve wildly misjudged, and we have only half as many people who go out door knocking, that’s still an average of 10-12 conversations each a week. That’s easy.

In an election this close, where swathes of unexpected seats could be up in the air due to the improved polling of minor parties, a strong ground game is vital. Effective Get Out The Vote targeting could make serious differences up and down the country.

But Douglas Alexander’s assertion that “it is on the ground where this election will be won or lost” is, sadly, untrue. This party has long boasted the impressive activist base, even when membership levels are not in our favour as they currently are – but this is no guarantee of success. The ‘four million conversations’ target is around double what we managed in 2010, and a lack of campaigning on the ground is not what held us back then. We could have knocked on eight million doors at the last election and we’d have still lost.

As Mark Ferguson and Marcus Roberts said on New Year’s Day, door knocking can’t do everything. There is nothing we could have done over the past five years that would have changed that; no amount of Arnie Graf inspired community organising would have meant a fundamental shift in the way elections are fought. The “air war” is still very much where the war is.

That’s why recent developments are so concerning. The Tories recently raised the election spending limit to £32.7 million; an amount only they have any chance of accruing. Labour recently admitted they are likely to be outspent by the Tories by three-to-one over the course of the campaign. If we assume that the Tories could spend close to limit, that could mean them splashing out an average of £1.8 million a week between now and the election.

So, while Labour will be having a quarter of a million conversations a week, the Tories will be spending a couple of million quid getting their messages out in the most effective ways possible.

While briefing out our chances of being outspent and playing up the importance of the grassroots is an excellent way of mobilising the base, we cannot afford to kid ourselves about how much of a struggle this will be if we do not make the most of every method of communication.

Working for LabourList, I do not need convincing of the virtues and effectiveness of online campaigning. When our defence of Ed Miliband was signed by over a thousand people in November, I know the enthusiasm shown by our readers was enough to convince wavering MPs what the mood of the party was. That’s a big difference right there.

Yet we cannot let ourselves believe that a national election can be driven by doorbells and trending topics. The most startling revelation about the Scottish referendum arrived this week when it transpired that Alex Salmond was convinced Yes had triumphed after the polls had closed, by as large a margin as 14 points(!), because their campaign’s private polling took social media into account. It’s amazing that such a clever politician could make such a stupid mistake.

Yes, let’s have these four million conversations (and more), let’s use social media to spread our important messages – but let’s not forget that so much of the election battle happens above our heads too.