“You can’t win a political campaign without momentum. With momentum, campaigns roll to victory, without it, they linger into defeat. It is surprising, then, that so few campaigns have a comprehensive plan to gain momentum, aiming their tools and strategy toward building this indispensable lifeblood of politics.” (www.localvictory.com/strategy/political-momentum-2.html)
We usually view momentum in the political process as a means of substantially increasing excitement and support for a dark horse or a front runner as massive bandwagoning takes place. Thus in the 1976 Democratic primary campaign in the United States, the number of democrats supporting Carter moved from 4% on February 15th to 26% on March 14th. In the 1988 Republican primary campaign, the number of republicans supporting George Bush increased from 45% on February 2nd to 69% on March 10th. Momentum can ebb and flow: in 1980, after his defeat of Ronald Reagan in the Iowa Republican primary, George Bush believed that what he described as the “Big Mo” was on his side, only to be stymied by Reagan a few weeks later in the New Hampshire.
It is claimed that politicians tend to worship momentum, the public appears spellbound by it, the media canonizes it and scholars are mystified by it. We are only months away from our national elections and the lack of momentum for any candidate is obvious; a state of affairs that usually favours the incumbent party. Even though the government is drifting from difficulty to difficulty, the opposition seems unable to grasp these opportunities to create momentum. But perhaps momentum, as it is normally conceived, is not applicable to countries such as ours where most people vote for the two major parties according to race.
Commentators have provided a number of theories about the development of momentum and the reasons why individuals tend to join bandwagons. Briefly, there is “contagion” or the “herd instinct” effect. As the candidate exudes rising levels of excitement and appears invincible “emotion” increases among supporters and non-supporters alike. Secondly, there are those who although well aware of the dubious qualities of a given candidate, join the momentum purely for the pleasure of backing a winner. There is then the strategic voter for whom electability is important and the purpose of primary campaigning is to select the candidate who has the best chance of winning the general election. There are also the cue-takers: individuals who do not care to consider the qualifications of any candidates but simply back the candidate who is the favourite of their group. Finally, some people simply throw in the towel: they join the bandwagon because they think that the election of the particular candidate is a foregone conclusion.
These theories were developed from analyses of mature democracies and therefore must be carefully considered if they are to be applied to our context, where it does not take much to see that cue-takers are usually dominant. That said, the trick is to design a plan which would create the momentum effects mentioned above, and perhaps others.
Joe Garecht claimed that an effective way to give a campaign momentum is to invent something “new”: a word or phrase, an image, a concept or an idea. This tactic makes a message worth talking about, makes the candidate instantly identifiable, and makes sure that activists are motivated to convey the message quickly and effectively. This is more difficult to execute than it sounds but Garecht gave as a successful example Newt Gingrich and the 1994 Republican congressional campaign.
The campaign team came up with two new ideas that propelled the GOP to majority status in the Congress for the first time in fifty years. Firstly, Gingrich nationalized the election: rather than presenting the Republican candidates as individuals running in individual districts as is usual, Gingrich unified and presented the Republican team to the American people as a whole, somewhat similarly to what occurs in a British parliamentary elections. For the first time in modern American history, the message to the voters was not “Vote for Victoria Smith, Republican for Congress” but “Vote Republican.”
In order to get the American voters to quickly understand and adapt to this concept, the Republicans came up with their second new idea, “The Contract With America.” The voters were then given a choice to vote for the Democrats and the usual promises, or to vote for the Republicans who offered a signed contract listing the steps the party would take if it was elected. The idea was novel, easy to spread, exciting to talk about and it worked.
President Obama’s simple slogan “Yes We Can”, which has travelled far beyond the shores of the United States, finding itself on numerous publicity posters, car stickers, songs and music videos, etc., provides a more recent example of momentum creation. “Yes We Can” is a translation of the rallying cry of Cesar Chavez, the early 20th century labour leader dedicated to bettering the lives of the working people. The phrase is said to have had “special resonance with farm workers, union workers, and Latino voters, traditionally Democratic voters whose support Obama needed to garner in order to secure his party’s nomination for the presidency. Throughout his campaign Obama situated himself in narratives of America’s hope and recovery alongside “average voters,” articulating his own story of perseverance and success with that of the American Dream, and his election as the means to salvage that dream for contemporary citizens.” (John M Kephart 111 & Stephen F Rafferty (2009) “Yes We Can”: Rhizomic Rhetorical Agency in Hyper-Modern Campaign Ecologies:” Argumentation and Advocacy)
There are many other ways of attempting to gain momentum: emphasizing (sometime even creating) opinion polls which show the candidate has the most electable, organizing “special groups,” “incentive groups,” etc., gaining celebrity endorsements and so on. In a more or less homogenous or dominant ethnic situation, inventing something “new” that will be attractive to the vast majority of people is less tricky than it is in a multi-ethnic society where the various communities tend to have and believe their own story. However, the point is that one needs a plan to aid the process of momentum building. No serious observer would deny that as things stand at present the incumbent PPP/C appears to have the upper hand. True, there is no surge towards it but unless the opposition quickly gains momentum, not only will the 2011 campaign be stolid but the opposition will most likely “linger into defeat.”
henryjeffrey@yahoo.com
