Labour’s ground campaign is better than the Tories’, and here’s why

Much has been said about why Labour lost the General Election – again – but in the current post-mortem, we are at risk of undermining the one thing we do better than any other political movement; our ground game. Labour should be immensely proud of what we can achieve together on the ground, entirely outclassing other political operations both in terms of our tactics and our reach.

In Ealing Central and Acton, our two and a half year campaign resulted in one of only ten Labour gains from the Tories, with the largest increase in vote share of any such seat. In 12 months before the general election, we spoke to 31,000 residents on the doorstep. Our script was simple. We asked if they had any local or national issues they’d like to raise with the party or the candidate (perhaps sparking a ‘conversation’) and used three very simple standardised questions to identify the likelihood that they would support us come election time. It worked. Any suggestion otherwise is just not grounded in reality.

Leicester MP Jon Ashworth is right to call on Labour not to write off our ground game, and we should resist suggestions like that of Emma Burnell that the Party has somehow “fetishised” our Voter Identification (VID) methods.

Take a minute to look at the Conservative method of canvassing. Much has been made of their 14 point ‘Survey’. It’s said that this is how the Tories had better, higher quality data from electors than Labour, in turn allowing them to better target leaflets and direct mail, more likely to persuade undecided voters to support them. Sounds great. You can see it here (spoiler alert – there is some commentary there as well which may give away my position). You can read about its genesis and underlying logic from the horse’s mouth here.

Let’s be clear about ‘The Survey’. The Conservatives never really used it to have conversations with anyone. In reality, they would knock on a door, ask the resident to fill it out, and say they’d be back in 30 minutes to collect it from them. Ignoring the logistical absurdity of asking your limited number of activists to traipse down each street twice having practically zero face-to-face conversations with any of the residents, we’ll assume for argument’s sake that their Survey is better than our tripartite question system and that we should adopt it. So now we need to do some enjoyable maths.

14 questions, at say, just over a minute each. At best this leaves us with each conversation last 15 minutes. Each household will have likely have more than one elector so if we’re going to be thorough we’d ask to speak to at least two – that’s 30 minutes on each door.

If the Tories complete their ‘constituency equalisation’ the average seat will have 70,000 electors. In order to be confident of victory you’ll want to speak to and convince 40% of those, that’s 28,000 people. That’s 14,000 doors at 30 minutes each. 7,000 surveying hours. In my experience Labour canvassing sessions last around two hours.  3,500 campaign sessions. You’ve got 5 years between elections so that’s 700 campaign sessions a year. We’re a dedicated bunch so we’ll campaign every day of the year, including Christmas Day, 365. So in order to speak to our 40% of electors we need to convince to vote Labour and have all those ‘proper conversations’ the Tories weren’t having with their Survey, we’d need to run more or less two campaign sessions, every day, for five years.

“But Seph, that’s nonsense, you’re not taking into account variations in the number of activists. More activists, more surveys, more progress.” Good point. Let’s say each Constituency Labour Party (CLP) has five dedicated canvassers at each of their campaign sessions. In each two hour session they would survey eight people each, that’s 40 residents per session. To reach 28,000 residents it would take 5 activists to be at 700 sessions, 140 a year, which remains, two-and-a-half sessions a week, every week, for five years.

This is ignoring the obvious facts that you’ll never get CLPs to campaign solidly at all times of the electoral cycle, forever, and that you won’t convince many of those 28,000 to vote for us so you may need to broaden your pool of target voters – which together mean more surveying hours, not fewer, in an ever shorter campaigning window. For this mathematical feat alone ‘The Survey’ should be ridiculed, not embraced.

I’m not saying Labour’s campaigning methods are perfect. I haven’t touched on the ongoing debate around ‘community organising’ which of course, needs to be implemented on top of straight Voter Identification, not instead of it. Likewise with respect to the growing importance of digital in identification and persuasion of voters. However, in campaigning lingo we often talk about the need to speak to voters “where they are, not where we want them to be”.  This normally refers to their political opinion, however, the simple truth remains that most voters are where they have always been – at home.

Labour is the largest political party in the UK by a country mile. That is our strength. We can go out and speak to people where they are in a way that no other organisation can. We need to maximise how many voters we can speak to in a very short space of time but also have as qualitative conversations as possible. This is not an easy task, but let’s be fair – we should be proud of where we are in terms of our organisational strength, not running it down.