{"id":227,"date":"2006-02-10T02:26:19","date_gmt":"2006-02-10T01:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=227"},"modified":"2006-02-10T02:29:44","modified_gmt":"2006-02-10T01:29:44","slug":"how-to-win-a-by-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=227","title":{"rendered":"How to win a by-election&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps not surprisingly (if you live in the locale) the Scottish Liberal Democrats ousted Labour in the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dunfermline_and_West_Fife_by-election,_2006\">Dunfermline and West Fife by-election<\/a>.   The amount of by-election paraphernalia that came through my letter-box was astounding.    Some nights we even got two deliveries from the same party. The paper-recyclers will do well this month.<\/p>\n<p>How did the Lib Dem candidate Willie Rennie overturn a huge Labour majority in what had been a safe Labour seat?  <\/p>\n<p>Leaflet drops, and plenty of them.  Make sure people don&#8217;t and can&#8217;t forget your name, that&#8217;s the message that came across.  And because the general voting public like cartoons, Willie associated himself with <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oor_Wullie\">Oor Wullie<\/a> &#8211; sometimes 2-box sketches, other times 3-box.  Dubious copyright issues appeared to be noted and brushed aside.  The quality of the leaflets left a lot to be desired, some even looked as if they were the infamous &#8220;copy of a copy of a copy, etc.&#8221;&#8230;despite this, folks remembered his name and voted for him.  I&#8217;m glad, because my mind often goes blank when presented with a list of names on a ballot paper&#8230;<\/p>\n<p> It&#8217;s a sceptical thought, however it&#8217;s a tactic that was deployed and worked&#8230;it got him 12,391 votes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;in one easy step<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}