There's one sentence I've probably said a thousand times, and every time somebody in the campaign HQ looks at me like I've just said something very strange. Elections aren't won on election day, but that's the easiest day to lose them. Elections are won months earlier, in offices with no cameras and nobody around to put any of it on Instagram. There's an extra problem. Before you even reach that Sunday morning, you have to survive something almost nobody plans for seriously: the stretch between the moment campaign silence begins and the moment the polls open. The myth of election day I've written about this before, but it's worth repeating. In most people's heads, election day is the climax of the campaign. The crown. The big moment. Candidates touring polling stations, HQ in some form of more or less controlled chaos, phones ringing, someone shouting numbers. Like an American movie, I admit. And completely wrong. Election day isn't the climax. I...

Postoji ta jedna rečenica koju izgovorite verovatno hiljadu puta, i svaki put vas neko pogleda kao da ste rekli nešto jako glupo. Izbori se ne dobijaju na izborni dan ali se tada najlakše gube. Ipak ću je ponoviti i ovde: izbori se dobijaju mesecima ranije, u kancelarijama u kojima nema kamera i nema nikoga ko bi to što se dešava postavio na Instagram. Pre nego što dođemo do te nedelje ujutru, treba preživeti i nešto što gotovo niko ne planira ozbiljno a to je period između trenutka kada počne izborna tišina do trenutka kada se otvore biračka mesta.   Mit o izbornom danu Pisao sam već o tome ali nije zgoreg ponoviti. U glavama većine ljudi izborni dan izgleda kao vrhunac kampanje, kruna, veliki trenutak. Kandidati obilaze biračka mesta, štab je u nekoj vrsti manje više kontrolisanog haosa, telefoni zvone, neko viče brojke. Kao u američkom filmu, priznajem, ali ta predstava je potpuno pogrešna. Izborni dan nije vrhunac. On treba da pokaže da sistem koji je mesecima građen konačno ra...

  The first fifteen installments of this series dealt mostly with what happens before anyone votes: segmentation, message, research, how to run a debate, how to read the numbers. This one is about legs. About the oldest, cheapest and — done properly — deadliest tool in a political campaign: knocking on somebody else’s door. There’s a whole library of Anglo-Saxon manuals on door-to-door (DtD) campaigning. Most were written for the American context and for a candidate introducing himself in his own district, armed with a list of registered voters, their voting history, and a law that lets you hand a man a registration form on his own doorstep. Nothing like that exists here in that form. What does exist is the logic of managing time, of personal contact, of discipline and systematic follow-up — and that part transfers almost intact. This text is built on their idea; it borrows the logic and tries to fit it to our terrain. And here’s maybe the most important part: the system has been t...