There was one principal local council by-election that took place on Thursday 27th January 2011. The Lib Dems held the seat. There were no parish or town council results reported to ALDC.
Oliver’s Battery and Badgers Farm is perhaps the best named ward of any I know in the UK. It’s in Winchester and it’s still held by the Lib Dems. This was an excellent campaign led by an excellent team. We were defending on three levels: inevitably the coalition, the Lib Dem led council and the exemplary district and County councillors for the area.
Our councillors’ failing health gave us the early warning that a by-election might be necessary. Wisely we did some succession planning and identified a possible replacement should the need occur. When the by-election was eventually called we could truthfully say that Brian Laming was David Spender’s chosen successor – and we did.
The weather played a part in this election as it has in many others this winter and we did not canvass as much as we would like but we built on the good work put in October and November surveying and leafleting. As a held ward with a reasonable shuttleworth base, on top of a good literature campaign it was crucial that we got out the vote (GOTV). Part of this was our postal vote campaign. The other half was a full “knobs on” GOTV operation.
The Tuesday before polling day saw Blue letters. The Wednesday, a stop press leaflet. The Tories, unusually put a last minute leaflet out condemning our group for being in disarray as we have suffered two defections from the group in recent months. Thursday saw mail-merged, targeted A3 “Goodmornings”, followed by two knock ups and a phone knock up. We covered all the polling stations and knocked up until ten.
In May even in erstwhile safe wards we need to run intensive GOTV operations and this is resource intensive. It may be time to look at either expanding your capacity or tightening your targeting strategy. In either case its time to pull in some favours and ask any relatives to keep May 5th free now! If you don’t live in a local authority with elections this May, think about where you can help the local elections in 2011 and start helping now!