‘Rallies are great for raising morale — but the election will be won or lost by the ability to get out the vote.’
IN four days — by Saturday, May 7 — the official campaign period for national and local elective positions will be over. Sunday, the day before the elections, will be a time for political organizations to get their machineries well-oiled because, let’s face it, whether it is the Philippines or say the USA, you need a robust get-out-the-vote campaign on Election Day to make sure your voters actually cast their votes.
You don’t win an election by leading in surveys, you win it by getting your supporters to actually go out and vote for you. As Hillary Clinton painfully learned in 2016, sometimes it doesn’t help when you’ve been considered a front runner for so long; some people (in her case, African-American voters) stayed home thinking that the lead was so big anyway one less vote won’t matter — but when enough of them stay home they can end up tipping the balance the other way.
This is just as true in an election system where votes are tallied individually as in our case, as it is in the US where you need to win enough states to earn the number of Electoral College votes required to get elected.
Actually, that’s what these last four days should already be about — getting the sample ballots out, getting your voters primed and ready, making sure you have lawyers on standby for possible last-minute challenges, even, let’s admit it, having enough cash on hand for last minute expenses.
Like burgers for your volunteers, for example.
It’s also time to prepare for the last hurrah — the “miting de avance” where the main candidates are presented to the public one last time and supporters get a chance to get emotional over all the time, effort and energy spent the last few months trying to convert the rest of the populace to one’s side. But this, like all other rallies during the campaign, should be viewed with some heaps of salt – rallies, like surveys, are only indicative of the passion of the moment and may be energizing and spirit-raising but in the end do not decide the outcome of the elections. Remember especially that each of us could be attending more than one rally in more than one location over the campaign period, making it less “scientific” a barometer of public opinion than a professionally run opinion poll.
Rallies are great for raising morale — but the election will be won or lost by the ability to get out the vote.
Indeed, that’s the only last hurrah that matters.
