The data below comes from Serbia. The pattern does not. Every campaign I've worked with on four continents has arrived at the same wrong conclusion about young voters, and arrived at it the same way: by putting the money where the campaign staff already spends its own time. The specific numbers here are Serbian, from an Ipsos tracker this July. But the shape of them — a generation gap that runs straight through the middle of the platform mix, and a level of distrust that no amount of reach can buy through — is the same in Nairobi, in Zagreb, in Budapest. What follows is the part most parties skip: reading the numbers before writing the message. “Young people aren't interested in politics or in joining parties.” In Serbian political life that sentence gets delivered with a weary sigh, as a premise nobody expects to change. From experience I know they are interested, and more than campaign headquarters assume. What they won't be is free labor putting up posters, or extras f...

  Every major technological change has also changed the way campaigns are run and the structure of the campaign headquarters. Television created media consultants, and the internet brought digital directors into the headquarters. Once we started leaning on databases, the people working with voter files, CRM systems and digital advertising moved from the edge of the operation to its centre. I still remember what a revolution it was when we set up the first internet department in a Serbian campaign headquarters, back in 2011. Suddenly the building held people whose job description had not existed five years earlier, while the press office carried on untouched. This text grew out of Miles Maftean’s analysis “Meet the Campaign AI Engineer” (Partisan Hub). His thesis struck me as correct but not sufficiently tested on terrain like ours, so I have extended it with data and with experience from the campaigns of the past year. Everyone is looking for the dragon in the wrong place The curre...

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...

  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...