Are candidates only a legal necessity?
Does your candidate make any difference to winning or losing?
How much difference does a political candidate really make?
Every party will of course tell you that their candidate is the best thing since sliced bread. Candidates, while quite properly acknowledging the role their team played in any victory, are human enough to feel that their personal virtues made the difference.
Against that was the admission of one former Cabinet Minister at a dinner I attended. They candidly acknowledged “when I was first elected, I’m lucky if 1,000 votes were for me. The rest was for David Cameron.”
One thousand votes might well be the difference between defeat and success; some representatives do build strong personal profiles that carry them through unfavourable elections. I do not say that exercising political office well doesn’t translate into votes – I think it is certainly true voters punish anyone they perceive as lazy. However, I am willing to ask the provocative question of whether candidates matter as much as we like to believe.
The essential candidate thesis
Political orthodoxy holds that the candidate must meet everyone. The campaign is won and lost on wearing out shoe leather, spending a fortune in hand sanitiser due to shaking thousands of hands, and attending countless fetes, bazaars, parish meetings, community groups, and anything else where they can demonstrate they are (to use the dated phrase) a ‘man of the people.’ Any second they don’t spend on their campaign is a precious moment the opposition are getting one up on them.
Ideally therefore they don’t have the inconvenience of employers demanding their time (unless the party employs them, in which case it does not count). The ideal candidate is a person of independent means, and has no external pressures that can get in the way of fighting for the cause. They have a long term relationship, because that projects stability and dependability, but their significant other doesn’t demand anything of them, and understands that the love of their live has precious little time for family life any more. If they have children, they are old enough to be independent and look after themselves – or in paid childcare.
On top of all this, they never need to sleep, and somehow manage to achieve in 24 hours what the rest of us mere mortals require 3 days to do.
This is the candidate that modern politics demands. It shouldn’t really be that much of a shock that if you are bright and talented, you wonder if it is worth giving up the holiday with the kids and significant other for the hope your party will win the election and the new Prime Minister might remember you.
Do candidates really win elections?
I have seen fantastic candidates lose and terrible candidates win. Explaining electoral success through candidate quality lacks compelling power of description. It only rings true as a myth and a stated ethos. The fact that a hard-working candidate is able to overcome the odds through stubbornness and perseverance, and that lazy candidates eventually find political gravity catches up with them, doesn’t do enough to offset the instances where the model does not hold true.
Two factors are much more persuasive than this – what may be termed “the mood of the country”, and the campaign machine.
The mood of the country thesis
When I talk of the mood of the country, surfing is an appropriate analogy. Parties do not directly control the general attitude of the electorate, in much the same way no surfer can control the waves. But the campaign that is attuned to the prevailing political winds can sense the direction of travel, and use that as the vehicle to success. The Conservative victory of 2019 is perhaps the best example. “Get Brexit Done” was an ingenious phrase, not because there was huge popular enthusiasm to leave the EU, but because people were “done” with the Brexit debate. Tory strategists spotted the prevailing wind, and rode to a handsome majority as a result.
Parties however have no control over the mood of the country – at worst it may be against them, and they have no means to prevent opponents from trying to sail in the same direction. The one variable wholly within their control is the campaign machine.
The campaign machine thesis
Much though we like to imagine that elections are decided by the thoughtful weighing of millions of considered and intelligent adults, the truth is less prosaic. Any campaign that can find those who generally agree with them, and in turn persuade them to vote, is 90% of the way towards success, provided sufficient support exists in the area. Literature that lauds candidates has the grace to recognise this truth – their candidate does not talk to everyone, but energises their supporters, and gives most attention to those yet to make up their minds.
It would be churlish to deny the impact a superb candidate can make in contributing to the crafting of sound policy, and they are most assuredly the most important shop front for party policy. The candidate alone however will never make the distance. Even at the modest level of a local district election, the electorate consists of around 5,000 voters, and approximately 2,800 homes. To deliver a single leaflet to every home in a typical ward takes about 28 hours of walking — and that’s assuming compact, city-style housing. You can multiply that number many more times if you want to talk to every voter.
We joked that the ideal candidate has a preternatural ability to somehow stretch 24 hours to achieve 72 hours of impact. The cost of leafleting and canvassing cannot be stretched. One candidate cannot do it alone – and if not at the local level, certainly not at the constituency level.
That then begs the question. If the quality of your candidate is a weak predictor for the subsequent outcome, what variable, that is within your control, will make the difference? And if the candidate is merely a legal requirement, why does the idea of the messiah candidate endure?
Deifying candidates masks structural weaknesses
We all like the idea that our political representatives should be giving something up in exchange for the privilege of holding power. The sentiment is expressed in the sit-com Yes Prime Minister when titular PM, Jim Hacker, pompously tells his wife “A career in public service involves some sacrifice” - which landed less well when she told him to sacrifice his lunch! But it reflects the public mindset – why else did the expenses scandal of 2009 land so hard, and why is every increase in MPs salaries and allowances greeted with howls of horror.
There is however a significant difference between public service – giving out of your abundance for the benefit of others, and public sacrifice – giving out of what you cannot afford to lose. The former is noble and commendable. The latter is a one-way ticket to burn-out, and only ever justified in extreme emergencies such as the advent of war.[i]
The myth of messiah candidate endures for two reasons. For those who admire the candidates they work hard for, it is because we want to believe that it is true. It energises us to believe we are working for a great leader and a great purpose. The alternative would be too demoralising to consider.
However, the biggest reason is that parties have preferred to use political office as leverage to use current and prospective candidates as indentured servants. Volunteers need persuaded, whereas those dreaming of green benches have, until recently, been prepared to crawl over broken glass to achieve their goals. You can understand why this is an attractive proposition for parties, but it is entirely self-defeating. Using candidates to mask the structural deficiencies of one’s own machine is no different to using the credit card to pay off the mortgage. Sooner or later there is a price to be paid.
Finding the focus that delivers wins
Two different exercises are called for. The first, beyond the scope of this essay, is to ask what reasonable and sustainable efforts look like for candidates. What might it look like to restore public service and choose to reject public sacrifice?
The second I will speak to, which is to answer “how are elections won?” Not by the legal requirement, though a bad candidate can cost you an election. But elections are won when you have a vision that lines up with the mood of the country, and a team that can carry that vision to the right audience. It is vulgarly described as the “grassroots” of the party – but it is more accurate to call it the nerve centre or the lifeblood. It feeds the political operation, and gives more sophisticated intelligence than any other mechanism – but like all living organisms it shrivels and dies without care.
What might it look like, today, for your candidate to be the catalyst for change in your cause, rather than the lone advocate?
[i] Even so, it is striking that for all his “blood, sweat, toil and tears”, Winston Churchill, a self-confessed chronic workaholic, made space throughout his life (including both World Wars) to have a nap every afternoon. Even great men have their limits.