The DA's election campaign machine at work. Picture Hein Kaiser
An election is like a reality show, and the drama peaks at the ballot box. But the real action happens before that, during the campaign, and the heat is turned up during election day.
And while by-elections come and go, mostly unnoticed by anyone outside of a particular ward, it’s a boxing match of mammoth proportions for parties in the ring.
An Ekurhuleni by-election this week, foreshadowed what voters might expect in the run-up to next year’s national poll. A battle to the last mobilised voter.
Because, campaign as much as you want, said local Democratic Alliance (DA) chief whip Mike Waters, it’s the voters who must be moved to make the effort, to cast their vote.
“If you don’t get your voters out to the polls, you don’t win elections.
And that’s crucial, particularly in urban seats, as there is generally a low poll turnout for by-elections,” Waters said.
Ward 25 in Ekurhuleni is the largest in the metro, and voters comprise mostly of what could be construed as a traditional DA base; predominantly white with a few informal settlements dotted between leafy suburbs, some rural parts and shantytowns housing the multiracial poor.
In its campaign, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) set out to fill potholes and clean up streets and informal settlements across all racial groups and income levels.
It was a mammoth effort of community service that the party said will not end, just because the poll was done. The EFF also fielded a white, Afrikaans, female candidate, Lulu de Beer.
Streetpoles were covered with party posters enticing, warning and promising for weeks.
The DA played a different campaign hand, said Waters, and focused on canvassing and visibility.
“We do telephonic canvassing from our historical data and we do it door-to-door, too,” he said. “We also have what we call blue waves with visibility around the ward at strategic points, we have tables at shopping centres and engage with voters.”
On election day, the party mobilised 240 people to help, a huge undertaking for a single ward. Election headquarters were set up in a church hall, next to one of the seven polling stations in the ward, where round tables seated teams of canvassers.
Each had a phone in hand, furiously dialling supporters in the area. Waters said based on the voter’s response during calls, data was captured and then matched with information inbound from polling stations, where the DA and other parties have agents present along with branded gazebos and, of course, voters rolls.
Waters said that the DA has a formula that it then uses to create a graph they call a “worm”, named like that because of the shape it takes.
The worm in turn informs the canvassers of their task ahead, and how many people still need to be moved to vote and what the DA supporter turnout has been thus far.
On the opposite side of the room there was giant flipboard that manages what the DA calls “sweepers”. Waters said sweepers are dispatched and then go from door-to-door, canvassing, getting people who may not have been reached telephonically, out to vote.
The EFF, whose performance in the poll saw support increase eightfold, it managed its canvassing effort from its polling station gazebos.
Here, De Beer personally ferried voters to the polls and thanked as many people as possible, just for turning up.
At one of the polls, a middleaged white, Afrikaans voter headed straight for the EFF when she arrived to vote.
She told The Citizen the parlance of other parties simply exhausted her, and that the red berets were the only political party that seemed to “give a damn” about the poor. She said that if De Beer wasn’t a candidate, she would have avoided the polls.
Another young family, also white, also turned up to shake De Beer’s hand. And then another, and another white voter headed for red. An EFF party official said that everyone, no matter whether rich or poor, has the right to service delivery, and that poverty has no colour.
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He said that all the EFF wants to do, is deliver to South Africans, and that the party is intent on showing that. Conspicuous by its absence was the ANC, who fielded a candidate, but kept a low profile. The party was so undercover that its noticeable poster count was in the lower half of single digits.
At the polling stations The Citizen visited, there was no ANC presence at all. The Freedom Front Plus’s (FF+) branding dominated at the polling stations with more banners, flags, posters and paraphernalia than a Springbok team’s World Cup win victory parade could wish for.
The turnout was low, only a quarter of eligible voters showed up to make their voices heard. Visibly lacking during The Citizen’s polling station visits, were voters that looked younger than 35, possibly an indication of disillusionment among the youth.
But it was the DA that managed to rally enough voters to cross the line. The DA blued out its competitors with a 66% victory, 19.5% went to the FF+ with the EFF gaining eight times the voted it had in 2021, settling in third place with just over 10% of the vote.
The ANC’s poor showing placed it second from the bottom with just over two percent of the result, a member 70 votes more than the worst performer, a local party called ICM.
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