The Campaign Reassessed

Abstract

Because elections are plainly decided more over the long haul than by any short term events, politicians and writers sometimes fall victim to the extreme assertion ‘Campaigns don’t change votes’. But when one party fails by 11 seats to retain power, another fails by a smaller amount to get a reasonably comfortable working majority, and a third needs only three more seats to hold a balancing position, it is inevitable that the actual campaign should be scrutinised again and again for those critical errors of judgment or faults in organisation that could have been decisive. Publicly politicians can be oddly fatalistic. In a BBC post-mortem on the election Mr. Maudling said

‘I never myself believe that the events that happened during the campaign had a decisive effect. I think the shift of popular voting between the beginning and the end of any general election campaign is likely to be pretty small.’