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The triumph of fear over experience
Dec. 15th, 2019 06:44 pmMy voting history includes Labour and Green over the years, but mostly Lib Dem, and in 2016, after the EU referendum, I joined the party. But I've been a very inactive member until recently, giving a bit of money to help campaigns here and there, no more. It's a slippery slope.
Bizarrely - and I'm sure it was just coincidence - on the day P posted to our local Virtual HQ Facebook group asking for volunteers to do data entry on a batch of questionnaires that had been sent out and I thought "I can do that" - I received a phone call from none other than Dr Phillip Lee, at that time the MP for Bracknell and our Lib Dem candidate for Wokingham, asking me to help in the campaign. I demurred, but I acknowledge it nudged me into a response on the Facebook group. And so the following Monday evening after work I found myself negotiating the route firstly from Reading station to Winnersh, and thence to P's house, where I met a number of volunteers dealing with these forms. A number of the forms - often completed in green ink - contained more fruity comments like "TRAITOR!", "TURNCOAT!" or "BETRAYAL!"; but many were more supportive. It turns out the local party had massively underestimated the likely number of responses, and I made several repeat visits to do more. I also learned that almost everyone, regardless of political affiliation, claims to care massively about the NHS; and that Conservative voters are highly concerned about crime, even though this is not a high-crime area.
This, with a bit of data science, led to more targeted mail-shots and the hand-writing of envelopes; and in the final week of the campaign I was persuaded to take up some leafleting. I'm sure my spatula techniques could be improved, but I have learned to hate low-level letterboxes and blocks of flats without "Trade" bells. On the eve of polling I was distributing more targeted leaflets on a new-build estate in Wokingham and encountered a Labour leafleter walking the same street in the opposite direction. "Well, this is awkward", he said; I just laughed and moved on. If I had presence of mind I would have asked why he wasn't working in neighbouring marginal Reading East; despite coming (a poor) second in 2015 and 2017, all the data showed clearly that Labour was out of the running here this time around. Our polling suggested we had a chance, some even putting us ahead, though only under benign conditions, locally and nationally, from other progressive parties.
Locally, we had a meeting on Wednesday evening to determine our polling day plan. I hadn't done any canvassing and didn't like the idea of "knocking-up" (getting out the vote) either. I wasn't convinced I was playing to my strengths by telling at the local polling station, but accepted it would be of some use, and I only had to endure it for one hour at a time, on a rotation with others. It didn't turn out to be so bad: the polling station staff were friendly and most people were content to volunteer their numbers, only a few declined more assertively; many didn't have their polling cards with them (which may, of course, have been a soft refusal). I was pleased to see many younger voters, although I fear they may have fallen for Labour's past-sell-by-date campaign based on its 2017 performance. A couple of visits from the local police in the evening turned out to be merely routine. I was lucky to be at HQ at the time our candidate visited to thank us for our efforts. Perhaps the most difficult thing all day was that the Conservatives hadn't bothered to field a teller themselves, so with only one person taking numbers, many were easily able to tailgate past and the numbers were missed. In the long term, it makes no difference - the marked register will become available to all parties; the immediacy of the data is only of use if it tells you who to target on the day. Returning to our local HQ each time, I had felt reasonably positive, but L, running the committee room, didn't feel the numbers were quite there for us. A party of hardy souls braved the weather during the afternoon to do what they could.
We returned home just in time for the exit poll, which was at the depressing end of earlier predictions. I stayed up until around midnight; hailing from the North East, the Blyth Valley result filled me with disbelief. I had a patchy night's sleep, and didn't get up until around 9 on Friday morning, at which point I found out our local result: we were 7000 votes short. Dejected but not all that surprised, I later realised that, of the constituency results I checked, including our seat gains, we had the largest increase in Lib Dem vote anywhere, but it wasn't enough.
Bizarrely - and I'm sure it was just coincidence - on the day P posted to our local Virtual HQ Facebook group asking for volunteers to do data entry on a batch of questionnaires that had been sent out and I thought "I can do that" - I received a phone call from none other than Dr Phillip Lee, at that time the MP for Bracknell and our Lib Dem candidate for Wokingham, asking me to help in the campaign. I demurred, but I acknowledge it nudged me into a response on the Facebook group. And so the following Monday evening after work I found myself negotiating the route firstly from Reading station to Winnersh, and thence to P's house, where I met a number of volunteers dealing with these forms. A number of the forms - often completed in green ink - contained more fruity comments like "TRAITOR!", "TURNCOAT!" or "BETRAYAL!"; but many were more supportive. It turns out the local party had massively underestimated the likely number of responses, and I made several repeat visits to do more. I also learned that almost everyone, regardless of political affiliation, claims to care massively about the NHS; and that Conservative voters are highly concerned about crime, even though this is not a high-crime area.
This, with a bit of data science, led to more targeted mail-shots and the hand-writing of envelopes; and in the final week of the campaign I was persuaded to take up some leafleting. I'm sure my spatula techniques could be improved, but I have learned to hate low-level letterboxes and blocks of flats without "Trade" bells. On the eve of polling I was distributing more targeted leaflets on a new-build estate in Wokingham and encountered a Labour leafleter walking the same street in the opposite direction. "Well, this is awkward", he said; I just laughed and moved on. If I had presence of mind I would have asked why he wasn't working in neighbouring marginal Reading East; despite coming (a poor) second in 2015 and 2017, all the data showed clearly that Labour was out of the running here this time around. Our polling suggested we had a chance, some even putting us ahead, though only under benign conditions, locally and nationally, from other progressive parties.
Locally, we had a meeting on Wednesday evening to determine our polling day plan. I hadn't done any canvassing and didn't like the idea of "knocking-up" (getting out the vote) either. I wasn't convinced I was playing to my strengths by telling at the local polling station, but accepted it would be of some use, and I only had to endure it for one hour at a time, on a rotation with others. It didn't turn out to be so bad: the polling station staff were friendly and most people were content to volunteer their numbers, only a few declined more assertively; many didn't have their polling cards with them (which may, of course, have been a soft refusal). I was pleased to see many younger voters, although I fear they may have fallen for Labour's past-sell-by-date campaign based on its 2017 performance. A couple of visits from the local police in the evening turned out to be merely routine. I was lucky to be at HQ at the time our candidate visited to thank us for our efforts. Perhaps the most difficult thing all day was that the Conservatives hadn't bothered to field a teller themselves, so with only one person taking numbers, many were easily able to tailgate past and the numbers were missed. In the long term, it makes no difference - the marked register will become available to all parties; the immediacy of the data is only of use if it tells you who to target on the day. Returning to our local HQ each time, I had felt reasonably positive, but L, running the committee room, didn't feel the numbers were quite there for us. A party of hardy souls braved the weather during the afternoon to do what they could.
We returned home just in time for the exit poll, which was at the depressing end of earlier predictions. I stayed up until around midnight; hailing from the North East, the Blyth Valley result filled me with disbelief. I had a patchy night's sleep, and didn't get up until around 9 on Friday morning, at which point I found out our local result: we were 7000 votes short. Dejected but not all that surprised, I later realised that, of the constituency results I checked, including our seat gains, we had the largest increase in Lib Dem vote anywhere, but it wasn't enough.