The difference between winning and losing in political wars is the critical movement of your troops throughout the campaign. It is called the ground game. The person who serves as the general leading the ground game can be a hard driving son of a bitch like WWII’s General George S. Patton or a more laid back leader like Patton’s counterpart, General Omar Bradley. As Patton learned when he outran his supply lines near Metz and Bradley learned in failing to close the Falaise Gap in Normandy, nobody runs a perfect campaign but you win or lose based on the entire effort.
Introducing this Carl von Clausewitz school of politics to Babel was a gamble but it ultimately paid off in winning the Babel mayoralty for our candidate. The first clue to the difficulty involved was when asking the campaign team how quickly we could assemble at least 400 door-to-door canvassers to knock on doors for our candidate. The look of incredulity from the Babelites around the table told it all.
“That’s not going to happen,” was the answer.
Not only were they right but we went on to find that a surprisingly few Babelites had any idea of the whys and wherefores of political canvassing. After spending a lifetime in political hotbeds, we had found virgin territory. It was enlightening: it was terrifying. You ask yourself: Do we use the Patton strategy or the Bradley strategy? Do we play ‘Ole blood and guts’ or do we soften it to be ‘the GIs general’?
The GIs general won. It was too long a campaign for bluster. And the candidate suited a more fatherly approach. One day while canvassing with the candidate, a Babel housewife asked: “Are you his father?”
The answer was automatic: “Nope, I’m his grandfather.” It just felt that way at times.
And, no, there is no family relationship. This guy is one of those very rare people in politics whom you realize is a natural. He can think on his feet. And he thinks politically. He revels in politics and in the stump speech. When canvassing, he always wants to add the next block to the route. He has a remarkable memory and a high intelligence. He is ambitious, with the ego to support his ambitions. In a lifetime in politics, you meet few like him. He will go where he wants to go.
But first Babel needs a mayor. We had to put together a ground game that could cover the majority of the 50,000 plus homes in Babel, while recognizing the unique demographics of the community. Finding the canvassers turned out to be the toughest job. We tried training them, begging for them and stealing them and gradually our team emerged. What we lacked in numbers, we made up in dedication.
The training sessions were fun. In a series of one evening each week, our classes attracted people who came to find out why we were telling them that going out and knocking on strangers’ doors is fun. It is. We got some dedicated canvassers out of that.
The best sources of canvassers are the political parties. The fiction that municipal politics is non-partisan worked for us in this case. We had Conservative Party members, NDP and Green Party canvassers to swell our ranks. Our candidate might be a liberal but the Liberal Party members in Babel need to stop fighting each each other to become an effective force. You just had to remember to quickly change the subject if a well-meaning conservative on the team thoughtlessly said something nice about that awful MP Brown.
And that team served our candidate well for the eight months of the campaign. By the time voters started going to the polls, the canvassers numbered in the hundreds.
But over the hottest summer on record, our ground game workers went to more than 30,000 homes in Babel. One in three was home (or would answer the door) and we got to speak to about 10,000 people. We learned what concerned them. They told us their voting intentions. They agreed to take signs. General Patton could not have done better. We had fun. And our guy won the election.
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