Amazing! I post a comment complaining about the lack of contact and get five comments, one from a member of a candidate's campaign team! It all makes me wonder who else is reading this blog...
The input regarding the difficulties in obtaining contacts is entirely valid, and I can't help feeling that we should enable all of the teams to have sufficient data to be able to contact as many members as they wish. After all, isn't that exactly what we encourage in parliamentary candidate selections?
At the same time, I'm hardly difficult to find. I'm the Local Party Chair in a constituency partly in the same borough as that of one of the candidates and yet even his campaign team (who do have my e-mail address and telephone number) haven't tried to contact me. I would have thought that Local Party Chairs are the very people to track down as we tend to have some resonance with our own members. We might be amenable to calling some of them to lobby for support, thus enabling the core campaign teams to focus on areas where they don't have a local contact.
The campaign team that did reach me suggested that I might like to register my support on the campaign website. Whilst they haven't asked me for my support, I must presume that they will approach me eventually...
Nothing here either, perhaps not surprisingly.
ReplyDeleteMind you, I'm not sure to what extent giving membership lists to candidates actually helped them. I phone canvassed for Susan Kramer in the London mayoral selection that she lost to Simon Hughes - every single person I spoke to said they would vote for her. Bet they didn't!