Election strategizing is now a science and not an art

Mar 27, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Old people have a saying. “You either know or don’t know. If you know, you know. If you don’t know go and find out.”
The euphoria of the launch of the APNU-AFC coalition has subsided. Reality has stepped in. Certainty has given way to uncertainty.
The coalition is now no longer as certain that they can beat the PPP as when they began their campaign. They are now waking up to the reality, as was suggested in this column, that it was always going to be easier for the parties to go their separate ways than to coalesce.
Not coalescing would have made it easier to reduce the ruling party’s share of the vote from 49% to 41%, than it would to increase the combined opposition take to over 50%. Coalition has created a different dynamic. The value of the combined coalition is not equal to the sum of its parts.
The din and excitement of the Pegasus, Linden, Brooklyn and Queens has died down. The surefootedness has gone. This is why we are now seeing signs of jitters within the coalition. This is why we are hearing talk from within about a bloated voters’ list. This is why we are hearing talk about how many Guyanese have migrated.
The opposition does not know how the election will turn out. They have no ideas of the numbers that will vote for them. And they now realize that the PPPC is no pushover, have never been, and that winning the election is not going to be easy.
They have also forgotten that election strategizing is now a science and no longer an art. The planning of election strategy is no longer done by lawyers, politicians and ex-army officers.  Elections strategy is now the forte of public relations firms, political pollsters and statisticians.  It is the latter two that develop models that tell you where to concentrate your energies and resources and how to target and win over swing votes.
If you do not have the right persons in place to plan your strategy, if you are depending on people on the ground and on the experience of activists, you are going to be left far behind by those who are employing more superior and scientific means to develop their campaign strategies.
The opposition does not know how the electorate is divided. But instead of trying to find out, they are creating their own narrative. They believe what they want to believe and they are creating their own stories to justify what they want to believe.
This is why we are now seeing references to how many immigrant visas were approved for Guyanese in the United States. We are also being provided with how many non-immigrant visas were issued.
A narrative is under construction. That narrative is that PPPC supporters are migrating in droves and therefore they do not have the numbers to beat the combined opposition. This is the narrative that is being spun to boost support for the coalition.
But it is not a new narrative. In 1992 we heard the same thing. We heard that during the hard years most of the supporters of the PPP left for Canada and the United States and therefore the PPP did not have the support to defeat the PNC. The PNC lost the 1992 elections.
But yet the narrative did not die. We heard it again in 1997, 2001, 2006 and 2011. The PPPC won all of those elections despite the massive number of its supporters who it is said are overseas.
Just last year there was a rumour making the grounds that the US Embassy was giving away visas to mainly East Indians so as to encourage them to leave the country. It was said at one time that some 50,000 persons had been issued with visas because the US wanted the PPP out.
That reminds me of the rumour that led to the creation of the AFC. The rumour within the PPP was that one PPP leader was feeding information to the US Embassy. This was the falsehood that was pedaled within the PPP leadership and which led to the expulsion of a member of the Central Executive.
It was one big lie. The Wikileaks cables did not reveal any contact with that person or subsequent support by the embassy for the AFC. In fact it revealed that the main interlocutors of the embassy were persons within the government and the security services. In other words, the US was getting most of their information from these sources rather than from the AFC.
The immigrant visa numbers are once again being provided to prove that migration is continuing. But only this time those presenting the numbers do not realize that the growth in the numbers is declining. They seem to have missed the significance of their own numbers. They should have the statisticians look at the numbers. They should have the pollsters run some surveys.
If you don’t know, find out. Do not try to convince yourself with speculation and convenient narratives.

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