Tuesday evening round up

Tuesday evening round up

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Donald Trump enters the race to be President. I’ll make a bold prediction now. Donald Trump will never be President of the United States of America

 

Today’s essential must read.

Conhome have published the inside story on how the Tories won the election, here is an excerpt.

Having picked the seats and selected the candidates, the next step was to understand key voters in each constituency. Lynton Crosby began working for the Conservatives in January 2012 (after calls from ConHome among others for the party to hire him), and part of his role was to lead on the polling and analysis of voters in each target constituency: how had they voted in the past, why had they done so, what might make them stick with the blues or switch, and so on. He believed there were more potential swing voters than people realised and, in particular, that Liberal Democrat supporters were more amenable to voting Tory than others realised.

This laid the foundations for the ground war: without it, the ground campaigning, phone calls and leaflets to come would have been far less effective. If the concept of the 40/40 strategy was a precision strike to win a majority, Crosby’s research (later bolstered by Jim Messina’s data) was aimed at delivering a precision strike to win a majority of votes in each seat.

The importance of getting the research right cannot be overstated, either in terms of the eventual election result, or the subsequent media confusion. The majority would be won by campaigns targeted directly at a relatively small number of groups, each composed of a relatively small number of people in a relatively small number of seats.

That level of detail was hard for those working at a national level to see, and Crosby’s own insistence that “we don’t talk about process” combined with it to make crucial parts of the campaign almost invisible. The Conservative approach was, in effect, a rather secret war, carried out below the radar of the watching national media, which had no means of assessing the quality of the information gathered in the databases, or all the ways in which it was duly exploited.

The full article is available here.

Labour’s deputy leadership nominations close tomorrow, 35 nominations are needed to make it on to the ballot paper.

 


 

TSE

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