Winning against the odds: All year-round, local and positive campaigning works

Editor’s note: it was a huge privilege to spend part of polling day campaigning for Alex Bulat in St Ives – and a joy to see that she had won – against all odds. As I did so, I was reminded of the campaigns I had run and been part of in North Hertfordshire, over many years. I understood what it takes to gain a ward in a non-battleground constituency with threadbare resources and where members receive constant requests – demands, even - to campaign elsewhere. I was reminded of the battles I had fought to make local members believe they could win in wards they hadn’t won in decades, and the arguments that had been had to secure financial and human resources. Winning in somewhere like St Ives takes hard graft, persistence and an unwavering belief that what seems politically impossible is, in fact, feasible. I was keen to Alex’s story. We will be interviewing her at 8.30am on Friday 23 May 2025 as part of our Ordinary Extraordinary series. The Zoom details will be circulated by email in our forthcoming newsletter.

Rachel Burgin, FWN Secretary

“It’s always been Conservative here.”

“Only the Lib Dems can beat the Conservatives.”

“You’d be better off joining Reform.”

These are just a few things people told me as I was campaigning in the local elections.

It’s easy to understand why many would think having a Labour County Councillor for St Ives South and Needingworth was an extremely unlikely outcome. Its residents have never elected anyone other than a Conservative councillor since the county council was created. Labour came third in the last county elections in 2021, behind the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. It’s in the constituency of Huntingdon, Sir John Major’s old seat, well known as a safe Conservative seat - even if the Conservatives held it by only 1,499 votes in the 2024 General Election.

But politics has been shifting, and you have to be present and knocking on doors in the area to understand why and how. I saw this at the 2022 Huntingdonshire District Council

elections, when all Conservatives lost their seats in St Ives - and St Ives South elected its first Labour District Councillor. I saw this when campaigning as the Labour Parliamentary Candidate  - on the doorstep and when the boxes were opened at the count. And I continued to see the appetite for change when I went back on the doorstep in St Ives South and Needingworth just a few weeks after the general election, and almost every weekend since.

With six candidates (including the previous Conservative County Councillor who stood as an independent) and at least three parties actively campaigning, I knew there’s a chance of winning. In the current political climate, “safe Conservative” or “safe Labour” seats are a thing of the past. In many areas, especially locally, we are seeing a multi-party system in practice, confined within the first-past the post voting system, where initially surprising results suddenly make sense when studying the vote splits, tactical voting and other local party dynamics.

I believe that most seats can be won with long-term planning, work and resources and with a proactive and committed candidate for the area. The problem is that lots of areas are written off as unwinnable or at least not worth the effort by parties. “You’d be better off campaigning in [insert name of target seat]” means that the infrastructure of campaigning in other areas is limited or inexistent, which obviously translates into the self-fulfilling prophecy of the “unwinnable seat”. The efforts are focussed in the seats that matter for majorities, whether that’s council or Parliament, which means that some voters will see their third canvasser that week before the elections, whereas other voters in nearby areas will not have seen a canvasser in the last 20 years.

When the results came in for St Ives South and Needingworth, many were surprised that I managed to gain a seat - the only Labour seat - outside Cambridge City, while some of the Cambridge seats were lost to the Liberal Democrats or Greens, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoralty went Conservative from Labour,  and overall the national picture was quite dire for fellow Labour councillors.

The campaign I ran required hundreds of hours of work and, most importantly, resilience.

The late nights after work writing my leaflets. The time I spent with our party secretary over

Christmas in a cafe doing the road groups. The living room - full of campaign materials. Doing two leaflets to every door with a few volunteers. Delivering the eve of poll leaflet until so late that I had to practice my skill of opening and closing a letter box in almost complete silence. The fact that we started logging data in the general election campaign and I started the county campaign with around 10% contact rate - and how every canvassing session got it closer to speaking to around a third of voters in the division. Those winter canvassing sessions with my partner where no one else thought it was a good idea to freeze canvassing in negative temperatures. It was a campaign where every conversation, at a local event or on the doorstep, mattered for the 88 voters who got it over the line in the end.

The advantage of standing in an area where perhaps not many believe you could win is that you do have more flexibility in how you run your campaign. I designed my campaign in the way I believe all campaigning should be - focused on the issues the candidate will actually be responsible for if elected, pragmatic and visible. Claiming on leaflets a councillor can fix national policy matters is disingenuous. And so is having unrealistic pledges - anyone has seen “fixing all potholes”?

Most of all, I am proud to have done a positive campaign - treating everyone, whether it’s everyone who helped knock on doors or delivering some leaflets, and indeed the “opposition”, in the way I wish to be treated. I know that usually if a candidate appeals to negative campaigning, they are thinking they’re losing - or in most cases, they’ve already lost. Most voters had enough of divisive and blame-game politics - they want to know what you can, or will do, if elected.

Dr Alex Bulat is the Labour and Co-Operative County Councillor for St Ives South and Needingworth on Cambridgeshire County Council. Outside of her county duties, she works as a policy adviser and also finance manager for a non-profit organisation.

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