54 Britain The EconomistNovember 23rd 2019
A
british electionstill means knocks on the door and uneasy
garden-path chats. You’re settling down to the new season of
“The Crown” when democracy intrudes in all its irritating vulgar-
ity. If you tell the candidate you are wavering, you are in for a long
conversation. If you express enthusiasm, you might end up with a
poster in your window and a spell rapping on doors yourself.
Street-by-street canvassing is costly in terms of time and effort,
consuming the lives of front-line politicians, as well as novices,
for weeks. It is also a pain. At this time of year it gets dark at 4pm
and—if this columnist’s experiences over the past few days are
anything to go by—pours with rain 24 hours a day. Politicians have
always faced dangers on the stump, such as slathering dogs and
snapping letter boxes. The perils are worse in polarised times. The
police recently released guidelines for candidates on how to stay
safe while canvassing. Lest we forget, Jo Cox was murdered by a far-
right fanatic during the referendum campaign of 2016.
Why do politicians still engage in pavement politics in the age
of the internet? Haven’t the guys in Silicon Valley invented magic
algorithms that can target every conceivable demographic? Some
of today’s canvassing techniques are strikingly similar to the sort
described in Anthony Trollope’s political novels of the Victorian
era, with spending promises taking the place of free alcohol.
The answer is partly that canvassing provides parties with local
knowledge. Banging on doors is not only the best way to identify
your supporters. It is also the best way to gauge degrees of warmth
or hostility. Waverers can be targeted for another visit. Get-off-my-
lawn types can be written off. Old-fashioned canvassing works
seamlessly with modern technology, as canvassers use apps such
as MinivanTouch that allow them to feed doorstep responses into
a central database. These data are then used for the get-out-the-
vote effort on election day, when thousands of volunteers will
make sure that “definites” get to the polling station and “persuad-
ables” are given one last push.
Even more important is the fact that canvassing forces politi-
cians to look voters in the eye—to deal with their constituents as
individuals, rather than as concocted stereotypes such as “Wor-
kington Man”. This columnist spent a little time following Sam Gy-
imah, a former Tory rising star who sacrificed the safe seat of EastSurrey to stand as a Liberal Democrat in marginal Kensington. Mr
Gyimah explained that a lot of what he was doing was “pushing wa-
verers into my column” (Kensington is full of rich people who dis-
like both Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader). He spent a re-
markable amount of time chatting to wavering voters, vanishing
for such a long time at one point that his fellow canvassers worried
that he had been kidnapped. The hard slog is made up for by magic
moments. One door he knocked on was opened by Sir Tim Sains-
bury, a former Tory minister and donor, who gave Mr Gyimah his
endorsement (and a big cheque).
Mr Gyimah points out that his new party has 120,000 members,
three-quarters of whom have joined since 2015. They are younger
than the Lib Dems of old, and fired up about the Brexit debacle. He
also points out that his new party is polling twice as well as it was at
this stage of the race in 2017. But for all his enthusiasm the most
important battle across the country is between Labour and the To-
ries. Who is doing better at old-fashioned pavement politics?
The blunt answer is Labour. The party has far more members
than the Conservatives—perhaps some 540,000 (though the figure
is disputed at the margins) to the Tories’ 160,000. It has a Praetor-
ian Guard of Momentum members who are capable of doing exact-
ly what their name describes: arriving en masse in marginal con-
stituencies and giving the local campaign a shove. Momentum is
particularly proud of its “decapitation” strategy of targeting senior
Tories with less-than-impregnable majorities, including Iain
Duncan Smith in Chingford and indeed Boris Johnson in Uxbridge.
Labour has also done more than the Tories to select candidates
who look like their constituents. Parties of all stripes have long
parachuted high-flyers into winnable seats, none more so perhaps
than New Labour, which sent the Miliband brothers of Primrose
Hill to South Shields and Doncaster. But this is more of a problem
for the Conservatives than for Labour. For one thing, the party’s
membership is concentrated in the south, whereas Labour’s mem-
bers are more dispersed. What’s more, fielding outsiders rein-
forces the stereotype that Tories are out-of-touch snobs. Mr Cor-
byn’s Labour Party has favoured candidates with deep local roots,
such as Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy, over androids with ppede-
grees from Oxford. Local roots matter most in the north, where re-
gional identities are more pronounced than in the south-east.
Labour has also done better at preserving long-standing tradi-
tions of street politics while embracing innovations. The great par-
ties used to have rival political gatherings in the north, the Dur-
ham Miners’ Gala for Labour and a Northumberland Pageant in
Alnwick Castle for the Tories. Whereas the Pageant died long ago,
the Miners’ Gala marches on. Labour has created a new class of £3
($3.90) supporters in order to boost its numbers. It has also out-
smarted the Conservatives in using the internet to organise people
on the ground. The Tories got into trouble with the Electoral Com-
mission in 2017 because they paid to bus in supporters to target
constituencies. Labour used a free ride-sharing app.Who’s there?
The Conservatives are well ahead in national polls. They are also
showing signs of making the gains in the north that they regard as
crucial to winning a majority. This columnist has found a lot of
support for making Brexit happen and a great deal of hostility to Mr
Corbyn. “I’m a moderate Labour supporter, so I’m voting Liberal
Democrat,” said one teacher in Bishop Auckland, matter-of-factly.
Whether Labour can use its superior ground game to frustrate the
growing expectation of a Tory victory is another matter. 7Bagehot Knock knock
Old-fashioned canvassing can still make all the difference