#17 How It's Actually Done: Election Day
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...