People who engage with political parties do so because they want to change something. For most people the challenges facing themselves, their neighbours and their community are the things that they want to address.

Candidates and campaign teams need to have a good knowledge and understanding of people’s living conditions of the people in their constituency and the challenges they face. It is not enough to think that because the candidate lives in the area and is aware of community problems that also know what the residents’ attitudes are, how they perceive the problems and how they think the problems should be solved. This is why it is important that campaign teams identify and understand those issues that are most important to the groups that their campaign will target.

During a campaign, general statements that are out of touch with the views and experiences of people in the community will be seen as weak arguments and can be easy for opponents to criticize. Doing research on the issues that are important to target groups will provide the campaign with useful information and knowledge and a good foundation for arguments for their candidate and against their opponents.

Identifying Issues

There are at least two broad areas that a campaign team needs to consider when they are identifying issues to focus on during a campaign:

1. People in the constituency: what problems do they experience?

• People: age groups, gender, employment and income status for example. Use official sources, interviews and meetings.

• Problems: housing, water, transport, education, health, environment, social issues, crime, violence, HIV-aids, etc.

• Hopes: what changes are people hoping for? What are their attitudes?

2. The physical environment in the ward: what exists in the area?

• Everything that exists, the problems and what plans exist for the future. Some examples are: housing, basic services, places of employment, roads, shops, schools, police services, community halls etc. (OPIC 2012: 33)

It is important that the campaign highlights those issues that will most appeal to the voters. Therefore creating the campaign message, the starting point should not simply be the party members’ own priorities for the coming term, but especially those issues that matter most to (potential) voters. These should be the key issues in the campaign.

Parties should not change their views to fit to the voters’ wishes, because that will reduce their credibility. Parties should remain faithful to their own values and ideology. What is important, however, is that the issues that they focus on during a campaign are the ones that matter to the voter. That is why it is important to poll voters’ opinions. This can be done in various ways, with opinion polls, focus groups, questionnaires in free local papers or debates in crowded places like markets (van den Boomen 2009:15).

Some examples of the kinds of tools that parties can use to find out these issues can be seen in tables 1-6 below.

Issue Selection

As the campaign team considers what issues the campaign will address through its message, there are two important things to remember.

• Firstly, the importance of a particular issue to the campaign’s target voters.

• Secondly, they should think about which candidate (theirs or their opponents) has the better position on this issue in the eyes of the voters.

Frequently, candidates either focus on issues that are not important to voters (while ignoring more important issues) or they focus on issues where their opponents can claim more credibility or a better position on the issue than their own candidate.

Campaign teams should use as many ways as they can to identify what the main priorities of the voters are and link them to their party’s priorities. These key issues will be the priorities that the party focuses on during the campaign, and the campaign should make sure that the party’s views on them should be clear to every voter (van den Boomen 2009:15).

Determining Issue Importance and Position

Suppose that campaign team is considering ten issues that may become factors in their upcoming election campaign. In order to preserve the focus of the campaign, they want to concentrate on only two or three, but which ones? Using this type of graph may help them choose.

First, rank the ten issues (A through J) in order of importance to their target voters (the numbers along the side of the box). In this example, Issue C is most important to voters, followed by Issues G, F, J, E, A, D, H, B, and I respectively.

Second, they rank the issues in order of how well their candidate does on these issues in comparison to their major opponents (the numbers along the bottom of the box). In this example, the voters believe the candidate will best be able to address issue G, followed by Issues J, A, I, B, E, H, F, C and D respectively.

Now, insert these ten issues onto the chart (as shown on the graph below), placing them in the various quadrants. The example should look something like the following graph:

 

Your campaign should focus on the issues that fall into the upper-right-hand quadrant. In this example, the candidate should focus on Issues G and J. The target audience believes that these issues are important and they believe that their candidate is best positioned to deal with them.

Focusing on issues in the lower-right-hand quadrant (Less Important/Good Position) will not help their candidate very much because the target audience does not consider them very important. Although focusing on these issues will not hurt the candidate, they should not waste scarce resources talking about things that the target audience does not care about.

Focusing on issues in the upper left-hand quadrant (Very Important/Poor Position) is actually quite dangerous. Although the target audience considers them important, they believe that other candidates are more likely to better deal with them. Thus, every time that a candidate talks about Issues C and F, their campaign is bringing the voters’ attention to the strengths of their opponent. In other words, they are spending their own resources to help their opponent.

Candidates often wrongly believe that it is possible to change voter’s minds about their positioning on issues. From a psychological standpoint, it is very difficult to change a voter’s mind about any issue; it is much easier to turn the focus of the debate onto issues where their candidate is well positioned. In the example above, why should their candidate spend scarce resources trying to change people’s minds about Issue C when he can immediately get favourable attention talking about Issue G? (NDI 2009 33-34)

Issues and The Campaign Message

The campaign message is not a party’s program or the list of issues you will address. Still, the campaign should address the issues that are important to your target voters.

You may think of a campaign’s message as the trunk of a large tree, strong, stable and well rooted in the candidate’s values and personal experience. Following this analogy, the campaign issues that the campaign will discuss are the tree branches, covering a wide area but all firmly connected to the message tree trunk. Similarly, the campaign must cover a broad range of issues that concern its target audience. However, in order to address these issues effectively, in order to avoid confusing their target voters with too many program ideas, it must tie all of these issues to the campaign message.