Cheap Votes Part 5 – unprofessional campaigning

If there is one thing that I believe is central to much of the issue around the value of the voter in Australia, it is the professionalism, or lack there of, in Australian campaigns.

The vast majority of people working on campaigns in Australia are not professional campaign operatives. They are predominantly party loyalists, staffers and a few jaded advertising/marketing/pr folk that have never bothered to specialise or even really understand best practice in one of the most dynamic areas of marcomms.

(Policy wonks and political staffers in particular make really lousy campaigners. They spend the rest of the electoral cycle working pretty hard to be able to do their thing without having to bend to the will of the voters, because they work for the politicians and the parties. They have a role to play – continuing to support the politician and doing the policy briefs – but they need to accept that they probably don’t have the skill in  supporter mobilisation, logistics, PR or advertising to be lead chair in the campaign. The campaign and the political office are different animals, and require different staff with different skill sets. )

Some are PR professionals who are pretty good at the political and issue media stuff, but can’t wade in to the policy, issue, logistics and candidate management that are equally important in a professionally managed campaign. And they can’t deliver the maximum PR value when the rest of the show isn’t doing what they need it to be doing.

There are a very select few that have been shipped out from the US just for the election. They are never here long enough to actually have a clue what is going on, and tend to roll out the classic tactics of a US campaign without any real care for whether they’ll work in the market.

An even smaller group are either US consultants who do get it or Australian consultants who have chosen to specialise in the field. The number in this group I would describe as being good at it I can count on one hand.

And most of these professionals are not delivering the maximum value that they could be to their campaigns, because they are trying to do everything rather than operating in a team of consultants with different specialisations as happens routinely on US campaigns.

Election campaigning is hard. In no other industry are you required to have more than 50% market share or you are out of business. They are endurance trials of logistics, crisis management, extensive planning and scheduling and people management. The communication that the voter receives is just the tip of the iceberg of a professionally managed campaign.

So you’d think that people would take it seriously enough to put professionals in charge of it, but no. Even as a professional, more often than not party operatives and candidates expect me to do it for free. (Thinking about the thousands I am owed by candidates who didn’t win, and thus thought that negated the need for them to pay the balance of their account, makes me ill.)

So what happens in the amateur managed campaign is predominantly a combination of the following:

• Poorly constructed arguments. Whether they are shallow slogan with nothing to back it up – eg. Stop The Boats, Moving Forward… or just a really bad explanation of a policy idea – eg. John Hewson’s mangling of the GST for the iconic example, or the People’s Forum idea Gillard had to swallow hard on in the last election… the lack of professional depth on argument construction and pitching is plainly visible in most Australian campaigns.
• Lack of message penetration. Often (but not always) linked to a lack of polling, many campaign messages simply don’t get through to the voters. This is most commonly manifested in news outlets spinning on nonsense because they don’t have meaty stories properly pitched to them to make sure they get up, and at the other end of the spectrum, voters not feeling informed enough to vote because they don’t know what the candidates stand for, or sometimes even who the candidates are.
• Lack of mobilisation/engagement. Unprofessional campaigns are generally not good at getting the boots on the ground and the volunteers working to reach as far and as wide as the campaign really needs to. Very few can even staff all booths on election day… something considered an indication of campaign health, and given the number of people who make up their mind on the way to or at the booth (courtesy of compulsory voting), an utterly critical factor. This of course flows on to a lack of fundraising and limits to the rest of the campaign’s operations.
• Really, really, really bad ads. I’m sure you don’t need examples. Nor would you need examples of the web/social media atrocities put forward in the name of an election campaign.
• Ineffective candidate management. As I said in Part 4, most of our candidates are pretty average. But even the good ones have a hard time because they don’t have the professional support to help them do things like present good speeches, media training so they can handle the tough interviews, properly brief them on policy issues, deal with voter’s specific queries and for some (not looking at anyone Tony) even the basics of getting to their events seems to be impossible. The number of candidates who crack up mid campaign with the pressure of it is pretty high without a professional team around them to support them through the campaigning process.
• Total absence of logistics and planning. The total chaos that surrounds most elections is to a certain extent part of the fun of it, but a well run campaign embraces and channels the chaos and always has great logistics so it doesn’t feel as chaotic as it really is. (I don’t know how many people I have met who have commented that they quit x party because they volunteered on a campaign and it was so poorly organised it turned them off politics forever. The parties are killing themselves in multiple ways, but the unprofessional campaign is a big one I’ve seen absolutely none of them address.)

There are other indicators, but these 6 areas are where it more often than not it falls apart, and the voter is far worse off for it.

Even if we sorted out all the other structural issues around the electoral system, and parties, and money, and candidates…. if we don’t run professional campaigns then the voters will not be empowered to make the most informed vote they could make. If the campaigning is still of such poor quality that they can’t get a detailed policy position out, connect with as many voters as possible, or put up a half decent website – then the rest of it doesn’t matter.

While I concede I’m biased in that I’d like to have a whole industry of professional political consultants in Australia rather than a tiny club of isolated individuals of note… I wouldn’t be a political consultant if I didn’t understand what a difference it can make. How much of an impact a professionally structured and managed campaign can have to shaping the debate, informing voters, and getting the right people elected.

And if getting the right people elected is accepted as the foundation of a healthy democracy and a vibrant, growing nation, then there is nothing more important than a professionally managed campaign to lay out the options to the voters in the most effective way possible.

This post is part of the Cheap Votes series. See more here.

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