I'm a Lib Dem, you could have written this exact piece about every Lib Dem general election except 2010 and 2019, which were both disasters in different ways.
2019 was a case of the entire political environment moving under our feet after the plan was planned. Seats we thought would be close - and which were close in October - were lost by 5000 votes or more, while seats we thought were cutting the margin of victory on were ones we went on to lose.
2010, the plan made sense for the actual polling day, but the "Cleggmania" surge resulted in Lib Dem local campaigners heading for tier-2 and tier-3 targets and ignoring the tier-1 targets that we should have been in. The official targets weren't changed, but people were in the wrong seats, and that was volunteers retargeting themselves. People just looked at the list of nearby targets and picked the most stretch target on the list. I was campaigning in Warrington South in 2010, even though I was officially aimed at Cheadle.
I'm strangely reassured that you have the same issues! I think your experience in 2010 does suggest that parties need to think about how they can get campaigners to campaign in targets, and how they can increase that.
The one issue that you have that we don't have are "safe seats": in a good year when we will hold most of our safe seats (like this year) we tell the held seats to campaign with just the people who won't go anywhere else. But there is only one seat we have won every election since the 1980s - Orkney and Shetland - and that seat is not exporting volunteers for obvious reasons.
There were a few seats we were so confident of gaining that we were running them on "own resources" (ie we weren't advising campaigners to travel into those seats) for the last 2-3 weeks. But I don't think we had people resident in a non-held seat heading elsewhere before polling day itself.
But yes: campaigners are not fungible. Some campaigners are more fungible than others, and one lesson is that you should be learning how fungible each campaigner is and then allocating them on that basis, so the people most prepared to campaign "where they are needed" are being used in the places they travel to, and they're being back-filled where they live by those less prepared to travel.
Also one lesson we seem to have to relearn every time: lots of our campaigners that travel well don't have cars, they either live in cities or they are students (or both). Lots of our target seats are suburban where everyone drives everywhere and they assume that all the campaigners arriving will have cars. Work out which jobs require a car and which don't, and allocate the non-car jobs to those arriving without. Also have your front-of-house people group people together, so the solo driver gets handed three students and four rounds of leaflets or four times as many doors to knock on as they'd do alone. Our by-election team is superb at this, but a lot of general election teams could benefit a lot from a skilled front-of-house in their HQ (also: pick an HQ near the station!).
To be fair, as incredible as it is to think Labour actually *underperformed* the polls, both the regular ones which reported vote share and most of the MRPs. This obviously means that the most marginal constituencies were in different places to the ones indicated by polling, so it's maybe not surprising that the party didn't always target the right areas perfectly.
It would be nice to have a voting system where ‘efficiency’ and tactical voting weren’t necessary. Sadly we have a cosy conspiracy to keep FPTP between Labour and Con.
I'm a Lib Dem, you could have written this exact piece about every Lib Dem general election except 2010 and 2019, which were both disasters in different ways.
2019 was a case of the entire political environment moving under our feet after the plan was planned. Seats we thought would be close - and which were close in October - were lost by 5000 votes or more, while seats we thought were cutting the margin of victory on were ones we went on to lose.
2010, the plan made sense for the actual polling day, but the "Cleggmania" surge resulted in Lib Dem local campaigners heading for tier-2 and tier-3 targets and ignoring the tier-1 targets that we should have been in. The official targets weren't changed, but people were in the wrong seats, and that was volunteers retargeting themselves. People just looked at the list of nearby targets and picked the most stretch target on the list. I was campaigning in Warrington South in 2010, even though I was officially aimed at Cheadle.
I'm strangely reassured that you have the same issues! I think your experience in 2010 does suggest that parties need to think about how they can get campaigners to campaign in targets, and how they can increase that.
The one issue that you have that we don't have are "safe seats": in a good year when we will hold most of our safe seats (like this year) we tell the held seats to campaign with just the people who won't go anywhere else. But there is only one seat we have won every election since the 1980s - Orkney and Shetland - and that seat is not exporting volunteers for obvious reasons.
There were a few seats we were so confident of gaining that we were running them on "own resources" (ie we weren't advising campaigners to travel into those seats) for the last 2-3 weeks. But I don't think we had people resident in a non-held seat heading elsewhere before polling day itself.
But yes: campaigners are not fungible. Some campaigners are more fungible than others, and one lesson is that you should be learning how fungible each campaigner is and then allocating them on that basis, so the people most prepared to campaign "where they are needed" are being used in the places they travel to, and they're being back-filled where they live by those less prepared to travel.
Also one lesson we seem to have to relearn every time: lots of our campaigners that travel well don't have cars, they either live in cities or they are students (or both). Lots of our target seats are suburban where everyone drives everywhere and they assume that all the campaigners arriving will have cars. Work out which jobs require a car and which don't, and allocate the non-car jobs to those arriving without. Also have your front-of-house people group people together, so the solo driver gets handed three students and four rounds of leaflets or four times as many doors to knock on as they'd do alone. Our by-election team is superb at this, but a lot of general election teams could benefit a lot from a skilled front-of-house in their HQ (also: pick an HQ near the station!).
To be fair, as incredible as it is to think Labour actually *underperformed* the polls, both the regular ones which reported vote share and most of the MRPs. This obviously means that the most marginal constituencies were in different places to the ones indicated by polling, so it's maybe not surprising that the party didn't always target the right areas perfectly.
Indeed - polling of whatever variety comes with error bars!
It would be nice to have a voting system where ‘efficiency’ and tactical voting weren’t necessary. Sadly we have a cosy conspiracy to keep FPTP between Labour and Con.
Enjoy being on top while it lasts
I agree - I would very much like us to change our electoral system.