Translation of excerpts from Robert Heinlein’s book, Take Your Government Back - part 20

Chapter 8 How to win an election: cont. Campaign on the ground: bypassing the homes of voters

When you start conducting an election campaign, a wide field of various activities appears to be in front of you, apparently useful for election success, and each type of activity will be zealously defended by some of your colleagues as “Just what we need!” . If you do not independently carefully evaluate what you need to do, and what you don’t, you will spend all your energy on meaningless activities, and in addition you will get a nervous exhaustion.

Therefore, evaluate each of your actions in terms of the following criteria:

a) Will this action help to get an additional specific vote, or votes registered by supporters of your party registered in your district?

b) If an action is useful rather from general considerations than from the point of view of achieving specific results, would it be useful in your district? And is it possible to perform this action without spending money? If you need to spend a lot of time and effort, whether it is yours or your candidate, is it really possible to benefit, or can it be better to spend this time sleeping, relaxing, entertaining, or learning political news?
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When you begin to evaluate your actions in this way, you will very soon learn how to apply the criteria described above subconsciously and automatically. For example, let's take a look at typical campaign management methods and evaluate their effectiveness.

Effective methods

These are methods that allow your candidate, you, or your volunteer to visit a voter's home. Visits to voters are the best way to campaign, and they should be your main activity during the campaign. Nothing should prevent them: neither a storm, nor slush, nor evening twilight, nor polite, but insistent demands of a Very Important Person, which is not so important to you, because it has only one electoral vote.

The best campaign in the homes of voters is the visit of the candidate himself. Imagine the seller of vacuum cleaners, ringing the door of your apartment, and ready on the spot to show how the vacuum cleaners offered by him work. And compare it with another seller, trying to persuade you to buy a vacuum cleaner, only telling about its advantages, and showing beautiful brochures outlining its advantages, while not showing the vacuum cleaner itself. Who do you think will sell more? Your candidate is the same product that you want to sell. And the easiest way to convince a customer to buy it is to show the goods face.

By making visits, you will get a huge advantage over your typical rivals, since such simple and old-fashioned methods of campaigning are no longer in favor in many places in our country. The majority of voters see with their own eyes the officials and candidates they have elected as rarely as elephants in the circus, and even less often - they communicate with them live. For them, the candidate speaking from a brightly lit tribune at a rally is the same inaccessible figure as the hero of the movie. But all these people, ordinary Americans, are interested in the personalities of candidates running for election, and when one of the candidates comes to their home, it’s as pleasant as riding a circus elephant. The glossy image on the podium, from a poster, or a photo in a newspaper turns out to be a living person with whom you can talk and who can be well recognized. Despite the fact that such visits by candidates are rare in our time, they are very appealing to voters, making them understand that real power in our country belongs to ordinary citizens, and not to an impersonal state machine. (A voter may express this idea in other terms, but the essence will be exactly that). "Here is a person who is truly interested in the good of ordinary people, not that these politicians in the government." And if your candidate has at least a little bit of charm, then he will easily be able to win the votes of the voters he attended. Many voters even changed their biases after the candidate’s visit.

At the same time, your rivals will be able to prevent you in only one single way - by arranging the same visits of your candidate. Since a typical candidate of rivals will not be much involved in visits, and atypical will not make more visits than your candidate, in this contest you will have a direct path to victory. In general, no other way of campaigning can be compared in efficiency with the use of personal visits to voters. In addition, this method is great for a volunteer organization, which has little money.

Let your candidate for three months, bypassing voters eight hours a day. Distribute the rest of his work in the campaign to the time free from visits, and do not overload other activities too much so that he does not tire beyond measure. It doesn't matter how important all of these activities seem (in fact, they are not all critical). Let your volunteers in their free time, bypass the voters as much as possible. All other activities should be done on a residual basis.

Organize work and deal with the inevitable attendant troubles will be you - the campaign manager. Although, in your free time, you too should bypass voters - less than the candidate, and more than your typical agitator. It is necessary for you personally, so as not to lose your vision of reality, otherwise your decisions will become divorced from it.

It may be objected that congress districts are too large for a candidate to visit all voters in the district, which means that you should not do this. This is not entirely true, because the larger the district, and the more physically difficult it is to visit all its voters, the greater the advantage that a candidate receives as a result of personal visits by voters. In elections on a national scale, the election territory is in fact so great that a candidate cannot visit all of them. But the district, not more than the Congress, can be and should be covered by the visits of the candidate, even if the territory includes several administrative districts. To do this, you need to plan well the candidate’s time in order to do more and make his work more efficient, focusing on densely populated areas, visiting your party’s list of voters registered in these areas, your party is perhaps the most important because the candidate shouldn’t waste time visiting a randomly selected home, and we'll talk more about that later.

Even in the largest constituency - the whole country - the same principles apply, only at a different level. The successful chairman of the national party committee seeks to personally get to know each of the more than 3,000 chairmen of district party committees, and to personally communicate with as many agitators as possible on the ground. When he organizes a candidate's pre-election tour of the country, he makes sure that the candidate does the same, insofar as he has enough time and energy, although the press pays more attention to electoral speeches and rallies than to a candidate's visitation of voters. Because the practical policy is to turn the faceless lines of voter lists into an endless chain of personal contacts with people.

And now let's see how our candidate Joe Chestnyaga can win his rival Jack Nadezhda in the election. Joe’s work schedule has 500 hours of voter visits. And he needs to get at least 1000 votes, and better - more. And if he cannot ensure that, on average, two guaranteed votes are received for each hour of time spent on visits, it is better for him not to run for elections at all.

A typical professional agitator brings from 10 to 50 new votes to your piggy bank (new in the sense that without an agitator’s visit, these voters would not have come to the polls at all). He is unlikely to bring more, and no matter how much the local party leader considers him an outstanding agitator. But the catch of agitators-volunteers working with sincere enthusiasm (provided that they are trained in the basics of agitation) only starts from 50 votes and can reach 150 votes, being limited, rather, to free time, which amateur-agitators have.

The population of the district usually has more than 300,000 people, but we need only 3,000 votes to win. Thus, for the allotted 500 hours of visits, your candidate will collect a third of the votes needed to win, not counting those received by other campaign methods. So, in terms of effectiveness, your candidate is forty professional agitators, and twelve volunteers. Moreover, a part of the votes collected by him could not be obtained by any other means.

If you use visits to voters, the task of your campaign headquarters is reduced only to maintaining parity with the actions of your opponents' campaign headquarters, which, of course, presents a certain complexity, but your volunteer will always be equal to the rival volunteer and will surpass the professional agitator. A candidate can drastically affect this balance, and even catch up if the agitators do not work hard enough. Visiting voters, your candidate is a formidable force for achieving victory in elections, at the same time receiving immunity from “candidacy” and becoming a mature statesman.

Ineffective campaign management techniques

Basically, these are overly general, non-targeted methods, the ones that I warned you about, describing the rules of a successful election campaign.

For example, one of your strong supporters comes to you, full of enthusiasm. He tells you that this Friday in the huge hall will be held a grand ball of a large hunting club. Your visitor is a member of this club, and he is familiar with many members of this club in your district. There will be a lot of audience: 4,000 tickets have already been sold to the ball. And the main thing - the event will be led by a supporter of your party, who can be persuaded to entrust your candidate with the award of the prize to the most beautiful participant of the ball. Of course, political speech in such a situation would be inappropriate, but you can ask the moderator several times in his speech to mention the name of your candidate. All the rest of the time, your candidate, in a company with an enthusiast who has come to you, will communicate with those present, obtaining votes, because in private conversations at the ball it is not forbidden to talk about politics. In addition, your rival Jack Hope will also be there, and we can’t let him jump! (the most convincing argument). Your friend will supply the candidate with a ticket to the ball and take him back and forth, it won't cost you anything.

Sounds good, isn't it? Your only problem with this invitation is to figure out how to give it up without offending your ardent but impractical supporter. Winning votes from a visit to such a party is not worth the time or effort spent. Even if your candidate has not scheduled any meetings for this time, let him sleep better than go to the ball. And that's why. First, four thousand club members will meet in a place not located in your district. Suppose that at least a thousand of them live in your district. Their age varies from 18 and up, but among those registered voters there will be at best 800 people. Four hundred of them will not be from among the supporters of your party (or apply the correlation of forces in your district here). Thus, your potential voters are only 10 percent of all those present. Even if your candidate will circulate in the crowd all evening, he will communicate with a maximum of 50 people. If he tries to change interlocutors faster, then there will be no benefit from such communication. Only 5 of the people he met will be registered voters - supporters of your party, only two of them voted in the primaries, one of them was already set to vote for him, so the candidate will earn only one electoral vote for the whole evening. Frankly, not a lot! So let him better spend this evening, resting at home.

But wait, but what about the announcement of his name leading the ball? Of the 400 potential voters, at least half of them will miss him, most of the remaining 200 will forget this name before the ball is over, and the few who hear the name will remember, associate it with the name on the ballot and vote for The candidate, because he had heard about him at the ball, can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Radio campaigns are an ineffective way of campaigning, except when a prominent politician speaks on issues of concern to the whole country. Of course, it would be nice if you could persuade a popular radio host to give the candidate the opportunity to speak on his program. Or if your organization has its own regular program on the radio, which has been going on for several months already, and there is evidence that your program has a large enough audience - then the candidate should really speak in this program. But just do not spend money on airtime for the candidate’s election speeches - his words will go nowhere. No one will listen to him: most radio listeners turn off the radio when a program on political topics begins.

The overwhelming majority of the rallies held outside of your constituency, even if they are other candidates, are also ineffective. If at such an event you need to appear for reasons of diplomacy, send one of your employees as a representative.

Posters are not worth the paper on which they are printed, if hung outside your county. Again, some of your employees will eagerly prove the benefits of hanging your candidate’s posters on beaches, road junctions, sporting events, and other places outside your district, where there are many people, some of whom may be your voters. Do not cross them, but note that these expenses are not included in the campaign budget, so let them realize their ideas with their own money.

Part 1, where there are links to all other parts