Poll Based Campaign

Every Electoral District is divided into 150-200 Polls with 150-200 residences in each one. The Returning Office will provide each candidate with a map showing the poll boundaries. After the election is over, Elections Ontario provides a report showing how many votes each candidate got in each poll. This can be very usefull if your campaign is based on Polls.

If you plan to do a lot of canvassing in your riding, you should run a poll based campaign, with the number of polls based on your ability to mount a FULL out campaign on the polls. If you have the resources to mount a full campaign in a single poll, then run full out in the single poll. If you can achieve a full out campaign only on a single poll, that would be an outstanding success and would also serve to help us to estimate the effort to run a full out campaign on a complete riding. If 2 polls or 3, all the better. It would take a lot of volunteers to do much more than that. For this to pay off, it has to be done systematically by poll, touching only the selected polls, and completely leaving alone the rest.

One of the things that is hard to understand is that some ridings, just by their very nature, will give us more votes than other ridings. Similarly some polls are better than others. Another thing that is hard to quantify is the potential "campaign effect" of a campaign.

There are generally 200 polls with 200 dwellings per poll and 2.5 people per dwelling. This gives you 100,000 voters. Generally, the spending limit is $100,000, so that gives you $500 per poll for signs, brochures and paid advertising (which we likely won't use).

So, if the local campaign can raise $500 then one poll is chosen. $1,000 - 2 polls, etc. Also, you need the volunteer power to work the polls. You need to knock on every door and talk to the people at least once and determine if they support you - this is absolutely key - to identify your support in the poll, so that on election day you can track them and make sure they vote. Volunteers to work the polls will be the limiting factor. We can raise money quicker than we can raise volunteers. If you have the volunteers to do this, you will want to get the list of electors from the Returning Officer.

By the way, the door knocking is not to explain or discuss policy - it is ONLY to identify existing and possible support. DO NOT GET DELAYED by someone who wants to know more; they could be NDP supporters trying to keep you from knocking on more doors. If they want more information, invite them to read the Platfrom and call the number on the back.

So even if we only do one poll, and it would be GREAT if we can, then we can have a measurable campaign effect from the door knocking, signs, flyers and get out the vote calls / poll scrutineer on election day. Even if all you can do is distribute Platforms in 1-2 polls, analysing the poll by poll results will be helpfull.

Pick the two best polls in the riding based on whatever gut feel you have about which is best. Flip a coin to pick one of the two polls to work full out, the same way you would do the whole riding if you had the time and money, and leave the other really great poll alone. On election day, you need a scrutineer at your poll (that is a long day job) and a couple of volunteers to make "Get Out The Vote" calls / rides to polls / babysitting / whatever it takes to get your vote to the poll, if called for. At the end of the night, you compare the poll you worked against the other poll you didn't work. Also you compare the poll you worked against the average of all the polls, and finally you compare the two best polls against the two worst polls. In this way you can determine both how well you selected your target polls and how much campaign effect was actually generated.

This is super valuable information to have - if we can get it. If we can establish some of the concepts described above and get some useful feedback, we move one step closer to where we want to go.