The last big thing I did in student radio (as a postgrad, I spent more time than my supervisors would have liked have in CUR1350’s basement studio) was putting together coverage of the last General Election. It was never going to be a classic; everyone was tired of Labour, but the opposition looked nothing like a government in waiting. It was all cued up for an as-you-were result.
Except in a few seats around the country, that is. Cambridge was one, Cardiff Central, Bristol West, Manchester Withington. All of them had something in common afterwards — new Liberal Democrat MPs — and something in common beforehand: Labour MPs in constituencies with a lot of students.
Students hated the Government in 2005. The Iraq war was the headline, but I reckon the real reason was at least as much student fees. Anne Campbell, the Cambridge incumbent, hadn’t so much swithered as pulled a handbrake turn on the subject; students vote their wallets just as much as anyone else. But there was no way a bunch of eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, who’d become politically aware in the dying years of the Thatcher and Major governments, would even consider voting Tory in numbers.
Enter the Lib Dems.
The Lib Dems had a lock on the ‘05 student vote, and they knew it. And because they knew it, they could exploit their greatest resource. They’ve got the best street team in UK politics. No-one knocks on doors like a Lib Dem activist, and their by-election record proves it. Now, students are a tough audience to canvas. That alone normally gets them beyond the reach of election-day get-out-the-vote efforts, because they’re just not entered in the database.
But if you were a student in Cambridge, in 2005, if you voted then you were probably voting Lib Dem. So if you mobilised a house of six, it was probably three net votes. The Lib Dems could afford to knock on every student door regardless of whether they were certain there were supporters there or not, because they knew their audience and demographic so well that they could trust in the law of averages.
Their candidate, David Howarth, won on a 19% swing.
I’ve been writing a lot about Google this last couple of weeks, so this might seem a bit of a digression. It isn’t, though; Google’s platform strategy now is the Lib Dems’ strategy from 2005. Google know who makes them money — the kind of people who’d use smartphones or netbooks or turn-by-turn navigation. If they sell more of their product by grabbing more time in front of these lovely, high-disposable-income eyeballs, then even if we, of course, would never be influenced by advertising, on average they’re going to win big. Google owns a percentage of the people on the Internet demographic. Anything which mobilises that audience makes them money in the long term, even if it costs them in the short term to do it.
The thing was, I knew I’d seen the tactic before. I just hadn’t worked out where!
