John Moss has been association chairman or deputy chairman in Chingford and Woodford Green through the last four general elections. He is also College Green Group’s candidates and campaigns manager.
On the morning of July 5, London’s political map had just nine blue dots representing the surviving Conservative MPs: Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, Croydon South, Harrow East, Romford, Hornchurch and Upminster, Orpington, Old Bexley, Bromley and Biggin Hill, and Chingford and Woodford Green.
Represented by Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP (IDS) since 1992, the probability of this last blue dot being swept away by Labour was, according to the BBC exit poll, 99 per cent However, it stunned the political commentariat when, against all forecasting, IDS secured reelection for another term.
Since 2010, Sir Iain’s majority had been gradually eroded by the Labour Party. His share of the vote had decreased from 52.8 per cent in 2010 to 48.5 per cent in 2019. Likewise, his majority had been narrowing from nearly 13,000 in 2010, to just 1,262 four and a half years ago – just 2.6 per cent of the vote. All signs pointed to a constituency that was rapidly changing demographically in favour of the Labour Party.
But, ultimately, this did not happen, and IDS was re-elected with a diminished share of the vote (35.6 per cent), but an increased majority of 4,757, almost ten per cent.
This dynamic can in part be attributed to the campaign of the former Labour-candidate-turned-independent Faiza Shaheen, who amassed an impressive 25.7 per cent of the vote on polling day. It is likely that this came from a coalition of predominantly former Labour voters, dissatisfied with her defenestration as the official Labour candidate just days before the nominations deadline, and pro-Gaza voters, who might have voted for a Workers Party candidate had they not with drawn to support Shaheen.
This led to two well-organised and -funded campaigns pushing left-leaning voters out to vote, probably increasing the turnout of those voters. Ultimately, the split between Shaheen and Shama Tatler, the official Labour candidate, was almost exactly 50/50.
But Sir Iain’s success wasn’t just down to that.
Chingford and Woodford Green sits against the Essex border, spanning the boundary between the London Boroughs of Redbridge and Waltham Forest. The Walthamstow constituency lies to the south and Ilford North to the east, both Labour. To the west, across the Lea Valley, lie Enfield North and Edmonton and Winchmore Hill lie, both also Labour-held. Labour run both Redbridge and Waltham Forest councils, with a significant majority on both.
I was elected as a Councillor in Chingford in 2012. The following year, I became a deputy chairman then, in 2017, chairman of the association.
IDS’s remarkable success in the 2024 election was the fruit of hard work done during those years. Through three rounds of council, mayoral, and general elections, we built the machine that delivered a seat for the Conservatives, which as the BBC exit poll was released, was shown as having a one per cent chance of being held.
Information
The information you need to win cannot be gathered in a month or bought in. It needs to be collected over time. At the very basic level, you have the electoral register, so you know who is eligible to vote, but beyond that everything has to be added to the data you hold on the electorate.
The Marked Registers – which shows who actually turned up at the polling station to vote or returned their postal ballot – are the only sources beyond the Electoral Roll of which you can be 100 per cent certain. Chingford and Woodford Green have entered every Marked Register since the 2001 general election, making it easier for the Association to know who votes.
Then there is information about people that comes from research, like demographic profiling done by Experian and others that categorise people through their shopping habits, what they read, and which car they drive, et al. These can be surprisingly accurate, but are still no better than 60 per cent certain in predicting how people might vote.
Then there are the things that people tell you. This is where integration starts to play a role.
Integration
Many of us have signed a petition, or completed a survey in the past. That tends to tell us two things: where people are, and what they think – or more accurately, what they think about a specific issue.
We recorded data ‘tags’ against people, telling us what they were in terms of home tenure, employment status and, if they had a job, what sort of job it was. We also captured individuals’ views on issues, like the Local Plan, traffic schemes, and on specific local campaigns. That told us where they stood on issues that were important to them.
Because we had this local information, we could match that against the higher-level demographic information that the party had bought in, allowing us to refine our targeting, bespoke to the constituency.
Over 11 years from 2013, we ran a huge number of petitions and online surveys within the constituency. From a paper petition which collected over 6,000 signatures opposing the removal of short-stay free parking, to local campaigns to keep pubs open or to improve facilities for train passengers, which might only have gathered a few hundred. If there was an opportunity to engage the electorate about an issue, we took it.
Many of these campaigns were run traditionally with paper forms at street stalls and community events. But they were also integrated with online platforms to widen our reach.
Our Association had a website that hosted online surveys and petitions; IDS and councillors had Facebook and other social media accounts through which links to those surveys were shared; we used geographically-targeted paid ads and embedded QR codes on leaflets and calling cards which took people to the website, if they were able to complete surveys themselves.
We also set up community-focused Facebook groups to support our messaging, reaching a membership of more than 35,000. Alongside advertising litter-picks and community gardening projects, those links to our petitions would occasionally appear.
During the year running up to the 2021 elections, when we had limited capacity for traditional, door-to-door campaigning owing to Covid-19 restrictions, we still gathered 21,000 voting intentions, mostly through this online engagement. That also helped improve the quality of our information.
Many people had been canvassed before, but they reconfirmed their intentions online, using the 0-10 likelihood-to-vote-for system. That meant our data was both recent and accurate. Many people who responded also gave us their email address and phone number. Several offered to help deliver leaflets, and some even joined the party and started canvassing with us.
The net result of all of this was that when the election was called on May22, we held ‘voting intention’ data for almost 40,000 electors. That allowed us to spend the entire election campaign communicating with only our target voters, just over 37,500 electors across the constituency. That’s where the infrastructure came into its own.
Infrastructure
We printed enveloped and bundled individual letters to those electors in our office, then volunteers delivered them between the May 22 and the dissolution of Parliament. More than half were distributed by a volunteer network, not party members or councillors, who went on to deliver five more items during the election campaign.
Our door-to-door canvassing teams then spoke to over 10,000 people during the following five weeks and we additionally sent emails out to segmented audiences. We held over 12,000 email addresses, and in total sent more than 150,000 individual emails from the campaign. We also called a significant proportion of the 7,000 telephone numbers we had gathered.
Across the six week campaign we only added just over 2,500 voting intentions, but we spoke to and had meaningful conversations with 10,000 crucial voters who were not necessarily going to vote for IDS.
The conversations we had with them very much followed the old election adage (when you get fed up of saying something, the electorate is just starting to hear it) but all those surveys, petitions, leaflets, letters, online posts, and stories that we had used to develop that infrastructure meant that, even on day one of the campaign, people were repeating back to us our core message – that IDS was an MP who had worked for local people on the things that mattered to them and he deserved their continued support.
The results show that the vast majority of them, in the end, did vote for him.
Many seats lost by fewer than 1,000 votes were not able to run the campaign we did. That’s because they hadn’t built up the infrastructure, they’d failed to integrate their campaigning between the MP, councillors, and community platforms run by Conservatives, and they didn’t have enough data to generate those more accurate bespoke audiences, so spent too much time knocking on every door.
As we rebuild, activity levels across associations need to be monitored and much more training offered or required of officers. Where we work, we win (h/t Andrew Kennedy) – but we need to work properly!
John Moss has been association chairman or deputy chairman in Chingford and Woodford Green through the last four general elections. He is also College Green Group’s candidates and campaigns manager.
On the morning of July 5, London’s political map had just nine blue dots representing the surviving Conservative MPs: Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, Croydon South, Harrow East, Romford, Hornchurch and Upminster, Orpington, Old Bexley, Bromley and Biggin Hill, and Chingford and Woodford Green.
Represented by Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP (IDS) since 1992, the probability of this last blue dot being swept away by Labour was, according to the BBC exit poll, 99 per cent However, it stunned the political commentariat when, against all forecasting, IDS secured reelection for another term.
Since 2010, Sir Iain’s majority had been gradually eroded by the Labour Party. His share of the vote had decreased from 52.8 per cent in 2010 to 48.5 per cent in 2019. Likewise, his majority had been narrowing from nearly 13,000 in 2010, to just 1,262 four and a half years ago – just 2.6 per cent of the vote. All signs pointed to a constituency that was rapidly changing demographically in favour of the Labour Party.
But, ultimately, this did not happen, and IDS was re-elected with a diminished share of the vote (35.6 per cent), but an increased majority of 4,757, almost ten per cent.
This dynamic can in part be attributed to the campaign of the former Labour-candidate-turned-independent Faiza Shaheen, who amassed an impressive 25.7 per cent of the vote on polling day. It is likely that this came from a coalition of predominantly former Labour voters, dissatisfied with her defenestration as the official Labour candidate just days before the nominations deadline, and pro-Gaza voters, who might have voted for a Workers Party candidate had they not with drawn to support Shaheen.
This led to two well-organised and -funded campaigns pushing left-leaning voters out to vote, probably increasing the turnout of those voters. Ultimately, the split between Shaheen and Shama Tatler, the official Labour candidate, was almost exactly 50/50.
But Sir Iain’s success wasn’t just down to that.
Chingford and Woodford Green sits against the Essex border, spanning the boundary between the London Boroughs of Redbridge and Waltham Forest. The Walthamstow constituency lies to the south and Ilford North to the east, both Labour. To the west, across the Lea Valley, lie Enfield North and Edmonton and Winchmore Hill lie, both also Labour-held. Labour run both Redbridge and Waltham Forest councils, with a significant majority on both.
I was elected as a Councillor in Chingford in 2012. The following year, I became a deputy chairman then, in 2017, chairman of the association.
IDS’s remarkable success in the 2024 election was the fruit of hard work done during those years. Through three rounds of council, mayoral, and general elections, we built the machine that delivered a seat for the Conservatives, which as the BBC exit poll was released, was shown as having a one per cent chance of being held.
Information
The information you need to win cannot be gathered in a month or bought in. It needs to be collected over time. At the very basic level, you have the electoral register, so you know who is eligible to vote, but beyond that everything has to be added to the data you hold on the electorate.
The Marked Registers – which shows who actually turned up at the polling station to vote or returned their postal ballot – are the only sources beyond the Electoral Roll of which you can be 100 per cent certain. Chingford and Woodford Green have entered every Marked Register since the 2001 general election, making it easier for the Association to know who votes.
Then there is information about people that comes from research, like demographic profiling done by Experian and others that categorise people through their shopping habits, what they read, and which car they drive, et al. These can be surprisingly accurate, but are still no better than 60 per cent certain in predicting how people might vote.
Then there are the things that people tell you. This is where integration starts to play a role.
Integration
Many of us have signed a petition, or completed a survey in the past. That tends to tell us two things: where people are, and what they think – or more accurately, what they think about a specific issue.
We recorded data ‘tags’ against people, telling us what they were in terms of home tenure, employment status and, if they had a job, what sort of job it was. We also captured individuals’ views on issues, like the Local Plan, traffic schemes, and on specific local campaigns. That told us where they stood on issues that were important to them.
Because we had this local information, we could match that against the higher-level demographic information that the party had bought in, allowing us to refine our targeting, bespoke to the constituency.
Over 11 years from 2013, we ran a huge number of petitions and online surveys within the constituency. From a paper petition which collected over 6,000 signatures opposing the removal of short-stay free parking, to local campaigns to keep pubs open or to improve facilities for train passengers, which might only have gathered a few hundred. If there was an opportunity to engage the electorate about an issue, we took it.
Many of these campaigns were run traditionally with paper forms at street stalls and community events. But they were also integrated with online platforms to widen our reach.
Our Association had a website that hosted online surveys and petitions; IDS and councillors had Facebook and other social media accounts through which links to those surveys were shared; we used geographically-targeted paid ads and embedded QR codes on leaflets and calling cards which took people to the website, if they were able to complete surveys themselves.
We also set up community-focused Facebook groups to support our messaging, reaching a membership of more than 35,000. Alongside advertising litter-picks and community gardening projects, those links to our petitions would occasionally appear.
During the year running up to the 2021 elections, when we had limited capacity for traditional, door-to-door campaigning owing to Covid-19 restrictions, we still gathered 21,000 voting intentions, mostly through this online engagement. That also helped improve the quality of our information.
Many people had been canvassed before, but they reconfirmed their intentions online, using the 0-10 likelihood-to-vote-for system. That meant our data was both recent and accurate. Many people who responded also gave us their email address and phone number. Several offered to help deliver leaflets, and some even joined the party and started canvassing with us.
The net result of all of this was that when the election was called on May22, we held ‘voting intention’ data for almost 40,000 electors. That allowed us to spend the entire election campaign communicating with only our target voters, just over 37,500 electors across the constituency. That’s where the infrastructure came into its own.
Infrastructure
We printed enveloped and bundled individual letters to those electors in our office, then volunteers delivered them between the May 22 and the dissolution of Parliament. More than half were distributed by a volunteer network, not party members or councillors, who went on to deliver five more items during the election campaign.
Our door-to-door canvassing teams then spoke to over 10,000 people during the following five weeks and we additionally sent emails out to segmented audiences. We held over 12,000 email addresses, and in total sent more than 150,000 individual emails from the campaign. We also called a significant proportion of the 7,000 telephone numbers we had gathered.
Across the six week campaign we only added just over 2,500 voting intentions, but we spoke to and had meaningful conversations with 10,000 crucial voters who were not necessarily going to vote for IDS.
The conversations we had with them very much followed the old election adage (when you get fed up of saying something, the electorate is just starting to hear it) but all those surveys, petitions, leaflets, letters, online posts, and stories that we had used to develop that infrastructure meant that, even on day one of the campaign, people were repeating back to us our core message – that IDS was an MP who had worked for local people on the things that mattered to them and he deserved their continued support.
The results show that the vast majority of them, in the end, did vote for him.
Many seats lost by fewer than 1,000 votes were not able to run the campaign we did. That’s because they hadn’t built up the infrastructure, they’d failed to integrate their campaigning between the MP, councillors, and community platforms run by Conservatives, and they didn’t have enough data to generate those more accurate bespoke audiences, so spent too much time knocking on every door.
As we rebuild, activity levels across associations need to be monitored and much more training offered or required of officers. Where we work, we win (h/t Andrew Kennedy) – but we need to work properly!