Blog- How to Generate Swing?
Generating swing is the critical part of politics because it defines electoral outcomes. While anti-incumbency is the most common cause of electoral swings, defying anti-incumbency and retaining governments is something that needs clear strategy understanding and also detailed planning and execution.
If you are in the Opposition, you tend to assume that anti incumbency is it going to do the trick for you and an electoral victory is almost the default outcome of the election. While anti-incumbency is going to be a big factor, it will have only a limited impact if the incumbent party is able to achieve high degree of polarization, either through its performance or through its targeted approach to its vote base.
Let's start with the basics first.
The incumbent party has a little advantage over the challenger because it has resources of the state and a greater control over the narrative. Suppose the ruling party is able to retain over 90% of its votes, it would need to refurbish its support base and achieve roughly the same vote share as it did in the previous election. The figure of 90% is critical because the lower the retention rate, the harder it has to work to stay in power.
The challenger party, on the other hand, needs to amplify the anti incumbency sentiment and ensure that it is able to get more than 10 to 15% of to vote polled by the ruling party in the previous election. Most ruling parties will be able to recover from a 10% shift away from them, but anything beyond that makes it difficult for them to hold on to power.
So if you are the ruling party, you are always wanting to find out how you can refurbish the base and get back to the same level as the previous election. If you are the challenger, your constantly looking at segments that are moving away or alliances which can get you fresh vote, the vote that you did not get in the previous election.
In any election, we are looking at primarily 3 kinds of voters- number one the people who voted in the last election, number 2- the people who are eligible to vote in the last election but did not turnout to vote, and number 3, voters who have become eligible to vote for the first time. The primary target here is the people who voted in the previous election and are expected to vote this time as well.
Electoral outcomes hence depend upon the satisfaction levels woh performance of the government, the performance of the local representative and above all the ideological commitment of the base to the party. This has become a very important part of modern political behaviour because political polarization forces a large number of voters to overlook shortcomings in the performance of the government or the representative and go out to vote for them again.
The advent of social media and the change in the political landscape all over the world has led to reduced focus on performance and increased focus on the overall political polarization in the society. If you think that heated political debates and slanted media coverage has little impact on electoral outcomes, think again. In country after country, state after state, we see more and more people note voting over the performance of the government, important issues like unemployment or inflation, but purely on the basis of the ideological alignments the tend to dominate electoral politics.
This is the reason why we see a large number of people responding to surveys indicating that they don't like the performance of the government, yet the end up voting for them again. This is also one of the reasons why electoral sops and pre poll promises are having a lower impact now than previously.
So if you are looking to generate a swing either in favour of the government or against it, you would need to do more than just highlight achievements of the government or its shortcomings. You would need to identify what would be move the needle and turn the voters towards you.
Good pre poll survey would help you understand and identify what segments are dissatisfied with the government, or have lower level of affinity to the party and r yet voting for them. The trick is in identifying the outer layers of the onion, and identify issues and rhetoric that will help you capture some mindspace.
In addition to this, we also need to identify communities and demographic segments which hold the highest promise in a broader electoral strategy. Once these segments are identified, we need to identify leadership in these segments, our content strategy and our communication vehicles to ensure that we are able to reach them with relevant content which will not only connect with them, but also change the way they are looking to vote.
Generating a swing hence has 2 critical elements- identifying communities and demographic groups that are most likely to swing and second and most important is how to reach them and generate that swing. We must always remember that voting is more and emotional choice than a rational one.
