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...

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...

  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...

A debate is rarely won by arguments alone. A debate is won by control. This is the sentence I repeat to every candidate before a TV appearance, and almost every time I hear the same reply: “I’ll win because I have better data, a better program, a better biography.” All of that may be true and still completely irrelevant, because the viewer at home does not remember arguments. They remember the impression. They remember who seemed calm and who seemed cornered, and most importantly: who commanded the studio and who was on the defensive. A TV studio is, by definition, hostile territory for a politician. You face several opponents there: a counterpart who wants to throw you off balance, a host who wants drama because drama boosts ratings, and a camera that records everything—especially what you think it’s not recording. There are rules for all three opponents. Here’s how it’s actually done. Being calm  is  a message Provocation in a studio is never accidental. A rival who insults ...