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...

I tell every campaign team the same thing after every election: “Now comes the detailed analysis.” Winners announce it at the very press conference where they declare victory, to show they are serious people. Losers announce the same thing, to show they have drawn the lessons from defeat and that there is a plan for next time. It sounds logical, like standard procedure, something that goes without saying — like the campaign silence period or a properly completed polling board record. Yes, I tell everyone. And almost nobody actually does it. What usually happens is called an analysis but is in fact either a celebration or a wake, depending on the outcome. The winning team scatters and everyone goes on holiday, because why analyse something that, by definition, worked. The losing team dissolves even faster, because nobody wants to sit in a room and count their own mistakes out loud. I have told both sides, in vain, that every campaign of mine was better than the one before it precisely b...

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...

Everyone wants to know how to win an election. There are seminars about it, handbooks about it, and consulting fees charged for it. Nobody talks about what comes the morning after — when the congratulations stop, and the work begins. Digging through my library and some old hard drives, I came across material I brought back years ago from a meeting of the EPP Campaign Managers group — the body where the heads of member parties' campaign war rooms sit, chaired at the time by Klaus Schüler, CDU's executive director and the man who ran Angela Merkel's campaigns across three election cycles. Yours truly served for a while as its vice-chair, despite not coming from an EU member state. So much for the theory that seating in those rooms follows protocol. Among those papers was a text that has been circulating through American campaign schools for decades: the ten most common mistakes candidates make after victory. I translated it — but I also adapted it to the Western Balkans, beca...

Twelve years ago, a single billboard in Bosnia and Hercegovina put my whole campaign team on its feet. Everyone was against it, even the woman who made the coffee. I broke the deadlock by letting the focus groups decide. Eight of them sided with the creative director. The billboard became legendary.  And then there’s what that episode taught me, the thing most campaigns still refuse to do, and it costs them elections. Here’s a scene that played out again and again in campaigns I worked on. “If you ask me, both the visual and the message are excellent.” The line comes from the creative director—the man who dreamed up the message, showing it to people who work for him and asking whether it’s any good. Everyone says yes, of course, so the materials go to print “because it’s urgent.” Three weeks later, when everybody is spitting that solution out, and the rating doesn’t climb but heads the other way, the same man explains that “the people simply didn’t understand the message.” Trouble ...