Byelection wins require a door-to-door grind, says Graham Steele

And they're off.

Three vacancies in the Nova Scotia Legislature will be filled on July 14 as voters go to the polls in Dartmouth South, Cape Breton Centre, and Sydney–Whitney Pier.

A campaign's objective is pretty simple: identify people who are going to vote for you, and get those people to the polls.

Everything else is a detail.

That's going to be an extra challenge in these byelections. These are the first July byelections in at least 85 years. Considering the winter we just had, grabbing voters' attention during our too-brief summer could be a problem.

Still, voter turnout in the July 1999 and August 2003 general elections was 68 per cent and 66 per cent, respectively. A byelection in August 1991, to replace John Buchanan in Halifax Atlantic, saw a turnout of 69 per cent. Even more impressive was a byelection in August 1989 in Cape Breton Centre — one of the seats in play now — which saw a turnout of 78 per cent.

So it can be done.

The candidate's job

A candidate has one job during an election: talk to as many voters as possible. If you're spending time on anything else, like studying policy or doing casework or sitting around the campaign office, you're doing it wrong.

You have to get out and meet the people.

The traditional way for a candidate to make contact is to "canvass," i.e. to knock on doors from morning to night.

Of course, this kind of campaigning comes most easily to pleasant, gregarious people. You have to like people. You have to enjoy meeting humanity in all its variety. If you don't, then maybe politics isn't for you.

Despite the fact that a good candidate will spend all day meeting voters, a good campaign manager takes the results with several grains of salt.

That's because Nova Scotians are polite. Most have a hard time saying to someone's face, "I'm not voting for you."

Besides, candidates are incurably optimistic and tend to see support everywhere.

Every candidate I've ever met believes they really can win. How else could they get out of bed in the morning, for the morning-to-night grind of door-knocking, if they didn't believe that victory is just around the next street corner?

Whether or not the results are reliable, candidate canvassing has great value. It exposes the candidate to the real people and real needs of the constituency. Other campaign workers can always follow up to get a more accurate gauge of voting intention.

Campaign tips

Here are some canvassing tips I picked up during the four elections in which I was a candidate:

• Every interaction with a voter is useful information.
• Don't take anything personally.
• It's a marathon. Pace yourself. Keep going even when you can't face even one more door.
• Don't be discouraged by indifference.
• Focus your efforts on where your likely votes are.
• You have a legal right to be in every residential building.
• In small residential buildings, count the number of electric meters on the side. That's how many units there are.
• If you're not sure if someone's a voter, assume they are until told otherwise.
• If you're not sure about a dog, move on.
• Don't spend too long at any one door. You can always follow up later, after you're elected.

The technology of campaigning is changing rapidly.

The traditional campaign relied on lists — lots and lots of lists. In the old days, the lists would be in the heads of your ward captains. Later, they would be on your volunteers' clipboards.

The modern campaign relies on sophisticated, computerized, national databases. These databases are huge, and everybody's in it. Now they're getting pushed out to mobile devices, so volunteers have the database with them as they go door-to-door.

The databases give the candidate lots of information about who's behind the door. It allows them to target which doors to knock on, and what to say when they get there.

These election databases will be prominent in the upcoming federal election. The provincial parties aren't quite as advanced, but they're getting there, so the byelection candidates should enjoy their relative freedom while it lasts.

Despite all the new technology, the basics of a campaign haven't changed, and never will: figure out who's going to support you, and then make sure they vote.