Let’s kick the door down on the secrecy and see how a modern campaign actually runs — the research involved, the technology, the analysis, the logistics of the ground game and the capabilities that get brought to the table when all of these things become integrated. Let’s look at the anatomy of a modern campaign — not just any campaign, but one of the more sophisticated campaigns ever run and one that is happening in Queensland right now.

First — a brief, partisan backgrounder. When the Campbell Newman government came to power in Queensland, it sacked 14,000 public servants and started attacking the delivery of a wide range of public services based on similar levels of competence demonstrated with its public sector “reform”. Enter Peter Costello. The Newman government, with delusions of grandeur stemming from its enormous victory, hired Costello to produce an alleged audit report that would provide a blueprint for the government’s policy direction over the next term (or five terms, if you listened to some of the hubris). Costello’s report basically recommends privatising everything the Queensland government owns and outsourcing everything it doesn’t where possible — a sort of ideological wet dream that makes Jeff Kennett’s Victoria appear as a bastion of socialist endeavour.

But Newman has promised there will be no privatisation without a mandate from the Queensland people at the next election (at some unspecified time) in an effort to curtail the backlash. While the summary report was released a while ago, the full report is due to be unveiled publicly some time during the next few weeks.

Then there’s us (my employer) — Queensland’s public sector union — and our campaign. From the very beginning — and this is going back to well before the last Queensland election — we discussed what might or might not happen with the next government and the resources and capabilities we might or might not need.

We knew from existing research that the Queensland public is vehemently opposed to the privatisation and outsourcing of public services. But was that opposition homogenous? If not, where was it strongest and weakest by geography, by demographic cohort, by political cohort — and what were the spreads involved?

We found out. >To do so took the largest single polling and research program in Australian history.

After the summary of the Costello report was released and the media had spread around the message of its contents for a week, we launched the first phase of a two-phase research program, but one that could be harnessed for a second use — canvassing and campaign recruitment. The timing was also important, as the government was just about to start considering the contents of the report. We wanted the electorates to give some pretty solid feedback immediately before their local LNP members went into the consideration phase. Suffice to say that was successful.

“Phase two of the research program was undertaking the largest proper political poll in Australian history, with a sample of over 36,000.”

We knew Megapoll was coming, which would provide a massive amount of statistically accurate data on opinion, yet we also knew the statistics involved with ringing random Queensland households — i.e. if you ring 10,000 random households and someone picks up the phone, we know what percentage will be men, what percentage will be women and what percentage of each of those will have what ages as a series of probability distributions.

So we bombarded strategic electorates (at first) with robocalls using ReachTEL that were unweighted. The dual-use robocalling was a simple message-and-question combination that went (with slight rewording each day to account for what day the calls were made on):

“This is a message from Together. On Monday, the Queensland state government is considering a report which recommends the privatisation of public services including health and hospitals, disability services, child protection, corrective services and schools. It means these public services could be handed to large corporations to run.

“Do you support or oppose the privatisation of these public services?”

People heard the message, which was important in and of itself, but for those who answered “oppose”, a follow-up question was asked:

“Would you be willing to be contacted to join a community campaign to stop the privatisation of these public services?”

The people who answered “yes” to this then had their numbers recorded. We are one of the few unions with our own dedicated outbound call centre, so we then used our call centre to contact these new recruits and bring them into the community campaign we were planning. It turned out to be so successful that we continued to run it for the next week across every LNP held electorate in Queensland, hitting over 130,000 people with the full message, getting over 50,000 household responses and garnering over 10,000 contacts, of which about 75% were in places and electorates that were “campaign viable”.

Phase two of the research program was undertaking the largest proper political poll in Australian history, with a sample of over 36,000. We polled Queensland at the electorate level, for every electorate, with a series of questions and demographic information. You can read all about the Megapoll results at my blog — it’s the state-level results with links to the micro-regional breakdowns (groups of seats between three and eight in number). I’ve also got it in a condensed version. The seat-level data as a whole is the second piece of data we’ll keep to ourselves, though we’re releasing a lot of it to various local media outlets so they can get a handle on the views of their local communities.

You cannot manage what you do not know. We now know.