SOYI­NI GREY

Se­nior Pro­duc­er

A be­hav­iour­al poll­ster says the UNC's iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of three main pil­lars of fo­cus for their cam­paign strat­e­gy was key to their elec­tion suc­cess.

Mwale Hen­ry says those pil­lars were: con­sol­i­dat­ing the par­ty's base; co­a­lesc­ing swing vot­ers who on­ly show-up to vote out the in­cum­bent gov­ern­ment; and dis­cour­ag­ing PNM vot­ers from ex­er­cis­ing their fran­chise.

He says the par­ty suc­cess­ful­ly ex­e­cut­ed all three. Of par­tic­u­lar note was the UNC's mas­tery of “long form can­vass­ing”.

“‘Long form can­vass­ing’ is where you spend 30-40 min­utes with a fam­i­ly,” he ex­plained. “I would have ob­served, per­son­al­ly, UNC can­di­dates would have spent time with fam­i­lies rather than do­ing what is called ‘nor­mal can­vass­ing’ or pow­er walks house-to-house—short con­ver­sa­tions, shak­ing hands, smil­ing and mov­ing on.”

Hen­ry says the UNC strat­e­gy is what helped them make in-roads in PNM ar­eas.

As for the PNM, based on the be­hav­iour of their own sup­port­ers, the two-leader strat­e­gy im­posed when Dr Kei­th Row­ley re­signed as prime min­is­ter—but stayed on as po­lit­i­cal leader—back­fired.

“What took place dur­ing the elec­tion was … Lit­er­al­ly, they were on the bat­tle­field as a lead­er­ship, but their foot sol­diers were ab­sent,” he point­ed out.

“That, in it­self, is a scary ques­tion [that] I guess would be an­swered at some point dur­ing the Gen­er­al Coun­cil Meet­ing to­day,” he said.

Mwale Hen­ry was a guest on to­day’s edi­tion of CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew show.