The day after
It’s finally over. The election that wouldn’t die is done, our country has a new PM, and my party has slightly improved its standing in the popular vote (+.2% of the popular vote; +84,000 votes). Most importantly, in my riding of Ottawa Centre, the Green Party finally broke 10% of the popular vote, meaning that we’re getting half our election expenses back. Which means that we can finally do something meaningful between the elections.
From the IT side, this election was not a huge success. Our grand plans of voter tracking systems never quite bore fruit. We still did good with our customized code, but our printer problems still caused lots of annoyance.On campus, we failed to get new volunteers, and we failed to properly use the ones we had. Perhaps most noticably, I became a choke point: too many parts of the campaign relied upon me, and that cost us. When I let stuff slide, both the on-campus and ITs parts of the campaign got hurt.
The biggest hurdle we have to jump is the quality of our planning. We went into the elction with an almost entirely fresh team. We had done little or no ground-work in the riding beforehand. We organized everything that we did at the last minute, as we needed it (usually about 15 minutes before the final deadline).
The most startling thing is that we did so well despite all of that. That’s a pretty strong recommendation; for our candidate; our position in the public’s mind; and the national party’s policy.
With half of our campaign spending back, we’re going to be able to lots of good stuff. We’re going to be able to get our candidate our in local politics, and get him involved in stuff that people care about. We’re going to be able to build a reasonable organization in the riding; and a reasonable organization on the local campuses. In some senses, the election is over and done with, but in others, it feels like the real struggle has just begun.
