The Moscow City Duma election campaign was not really an “election” in the political—or even common-sense—meaning of the word, but, as I wrote before, it still offers a lot of important lessons in campaign strategy.
A wide range of approaches, campaigning methods, and fundraising techniques were used. Some candidates ran on “politics,” while others focused on “urban issues.”
All of this took place amid very low turnout and heavy use of administrative resources (state-backed institutional leverage). Elections like these will be the Kremlin’s latest fashion in the near future, and I would strongly recommend that anyone planning to run for office, work on campaign teams, and so on, study the most successful campaigns closely.
That makes far more sense than relying, for example, on the experience of our mayoral campaign—or those in Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk—because major mayoral elections are highly specific, heavily politicized, and dependent on a whole chain of accidents and coincidences.
In a month, everyone will have forgotten who did what, and the whole thing will be buried under a pile of myths, so anyone interested should spend a little time now reviewing these campaigns. Most candidates and campaign teams are quite accessible and willing to answer questions.
Unfortunately, in Russia, 99% of political scientists are cranks whose job consists of giving absurd “expert commentary” to the media, so we’re not going to find any serious political analysis of these elections—we have to do it all ourselves.
To make things easier, I asked Kira Yarmysh to compile a simple ranking of candidates by result (percentages/votes). We included only those who were not clearly running with the use of administrative resources, so, for example, Sidnev from Civic Platform is included, while Yarmolnik is not. Kochetkov from A Just Russia is included, while Sviridov is not.
I’m not claiming to know every detail of the administrative alignments, but overall this is accurate.
So: look at the districts, the candidates, and the results; search for them—and their teams—online. Study them, compare them, ask questions.
It would be great if someone good with data could put together more detailed rankings and tables: - a ranking by cost per vote; - an analysis of second- and third-place finishes; - the overall “pro-government” vs. “anti-government” percentage by district; - a comparison with the mayoral election; I’d be happy to publish it.
It’s better to do all this now than to run around like mad right before the election looking for data, half of which can no longer even be found.
Tags
Places