Sunday, November 16, 2008

Quick Analysis of the Victoria Election

The results for the candidates for council split into several groupings:

1) The people elected. There are a couple of tiers here, but in general the winners were clearly ahead of all the other candidates on the ballot. Yes, Charlayne was almost 4000 votes ahead of Chris Coleman and John Luton, but in general there was a very clear group that won the day.

2) The gap between eight and ninth was close to 2300 votes - a huge difference, one that I have not seen in Victoria before. Rob Randall came ninth, but miles behind John Luton. The candidates placing 17th to 9th were separated on average by about 100 votes each. They were all people that put a serious effort into getting elected and they all fell very far off of the mark.

I had not expected there to be such a huge gap between the winners and losers. I believe this is due to the fact that the public had no easy and effective way to find out who anyone was. I also know that the candidates ran as individuals which meant that for each new person they got to vote they effectively made sure the better known people got more votes as well. Someone like Rose Henry or Susan Woods that campaigned hard effectively was also campaigning for the people that won the election.

3) The rest, not quite fair to put 18th place finisher Richard Park in this category, but he was over 600 votes short of 17th and almost 800 ahead of 19th. I know that a number of the candidates that finished at the bottom here tried very hard and put in a lot of effort. I expect to see Richard Park, Simon Nattrass, Joseph Boutilier, and Chris Munkacsi make very serious attempts to get elected next time.

Tavis Dodds is someone I expected to finish in the top 20, not 25th. Suzanne Carroll is someone I thought would finish in the bottom five, not 22nd.

Candidates for a future election need to think about what it takes to get elected. The 14 or so people campaigned hard to get elected this time but finished so far out of the money need to spend some time learning more about campaigning skills and election strategies. In meeting the candidates in this election, the one single thing I noticed is that most of them need to learn a lot more about how to run an election campaign.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd love it if you offered your own thoughts on how you would run an election campaign, while we're all still flocking to your blog.

Bernard said...

I will try to do that in the next week.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I noticed odd results too. Simon campaigned hard and got only seven more votes than Suzanne, who I didn't even see campaign. At one all candidates meeting she even declined to speak, only agreeing to after being prodded.

Hugh Kruzel's dismal 107 votes was a big surprise. I thought he would pick up a couple hundred or more.