By now, the majority of campaign teams up and down the country will have started canvassing in earnest. As a result, you should soon have a respectable quantity of canvass returns. Now is the time to sit down and analyse these returns, work out what they mean and decide what your plan of action is.
You can tell a lot from your first 50 contacts. And you don’t need to have completed a full canvass to ascertain what is happening on the ground.
Indeed, in a number of areas, historical canvass data is often patchy (or non-existent), but don’t be put off, a small sample can still supply you with the information you need to target.
Your canvass data can show:
- The strength of your support in any geographical area – a street, an estate, a polling district, a ward, division, even a constituency
- The relative strengths of your opponents in each area
- Any changes in the level of support for each party (even at this early stage in the campaign)
- Comparable figures for previous years which will show whether you (or your opponents) are holding your own, losing or improving support. Very, very important this year.
- Which wards you need to concentrate on to maximise the number of seats you will win.
Don’t just look at the strength of the three or four parties on the canvass card comparing support to earlier in the campaign or the last time the seat was fought. What is as important is what is happening to your Non-voters and Antis. If the canvass is showing more Non-Voters than last time, then turnout will be down. If the Antis are up, then people are clearly voting in larger numbers for someone else who is not you!
Remember details of how to analyse your canvass data are in chapter 9 of Winning Local Elections Volume 1 and chapter 10 of Volume 2.
There is a danger of dismissing changed figures as a ‘quirk of statistics’. Don’t fall in to that trap. If our vote is diminishing and our opponents’ is increasing that means there is a problem. But, DON’T PANIC. Re-examine the data and re-double your efforts. Think about an extra leaflet, some street letters or a target mailing.
Whatever you do, don’t sit there like rabbits in the headlights waiting to be run over!