I walked into Campaign HQ with 14 days left until Election Day [see photo].I expected everyone to be on a high. The truth was the whole place was in a massive funk. There was a buzz around that said "we are going to lose Government!"
"What are you all bitching about.... we are going to win", I said to all of them. They thought I was delusional. They point to the fact that I was a "Johnny-cum-lately" to the nuts-and-bolts of running this Campaign because I had been attending to my daytime job [working on long-term policy development for the nation] and not on the frontline with these troops.
So I shut my trap and wandered off to look at the core issues of the Campaign, the narrative we were running on, the marketing programme we had running, and the reasons the Opposition were seemingly winning over the voters.
First and foremost, let me say that my team represented an incumbent National Government and we all knew that we had done a good job at governing the country. Furthermore, the members in the Campaign HQ were all secure in their jobs [that was our main advantage]. Meanwhile, over in the Opposition Bunker there were people competing with and even knee-capping rivals in a loosely united team [I had my spies over there].
I wandered out the back of the room to read the polls on the top five issues. The top four favoured the Opposition. And they were running hard on those issues. They had the support of the media and so their advertising messages got repeated and repeated. BUT. I got our experts over to help me take a deep-dive into the cross-tabs on the top ten issues. And here we found gold. It turned out that the top five issues on the polls were not in the top five of the voters. Number seven on the poll for the voters was the one that they blamed the Government for in the run-up to the Election. It turned out that issue was high taxes. Over the next few days the Campaign Team got up some adverts that showed loads and loads of money being thrown at a group of voters. The tagline was that these voters would get their tax money back when the Government was returned to office and could legislate to slash the current tax rates. The narrative in those adverts won the Election.
Even with those ads running the Opposition kept attacking the Government on a bunch of irrelevant issues because those were the ones that were the best fit with their ideology. And they were on the media, every hour of every day, hammering away at a scandal about financial arrangements that some key senior Ministers had entered into. The media kept plugging away at this scandal until the Prime Minster came out and said "I have these arrangements too because I have a duty to my family and to help them with their personal welfare".
The scandal went away. Finally, the tax ads got some "free air" and it was all over.
The Government was returned with the largest majority ever recorded in our history.
Richard.
PS On LinkedIn and Facebook I have a riff about the Vice President choice being between Rice and Harris and why his Campaign Team might choose one and not the other. Then today, 12th August 2020, I posted a riff on why Biden's choice of Harris for Vice President will likely cost him victory in the 2020 Election for President.
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