The last week blues

It’s the last week of the Queensland state election campaign and if you’re sick to death of the slogans, the bunting, the people waving with coreflutes as you drive past and just politics in general, spare a thought for the people who’ve been organising it and doing it for months.

Back in my old life, I worked on and managed election campaigns. I’ve been the annoying person handing out how to vote cards and I’ve been the less visible annoying person working on strategy and key messages. I’ve designed flyers, letterboxed, sat at pre-poll, scrutineered into the night, had heated disagreements with the Electoral Commission and other campaign workers, and transcribed media interviews where the candidate went rogue.

It’s exhausting. And the last week is where the wheels come off.

You’re tired. So tired, to the point of emotional. You’ve been switched on for months, living and dying by every news bulletin and every phone call.

You’ve been living on coffee and takeout for weeks; it’s a miracle you don’t have scurvy.

You’re wildly vacillating between confident and despondent. A few people say nice things to you while door knocking and you’re positive you’ll win. Then someone calls you or your candidate scum and you spiral. It’s all over. This rollercoaster continues until 6pm on election day…sometimes beyond. Your nervous system is shot.

(This becomes 100 times worse if there is a contentious issue being discussed in the broader campaign or in your electorate. See last year’s referendum as a gold star example of how absolutely horrible people can be.)

The media is your best friend and your worst enemy at the same time. You sweat on everything they say, over-analyse every question and write answers to questions you hope they’ll never ask because the answer is below average at best. Then you hold your breath as your candidate delivers the answer. Sometimes well. Sometimes not so well.

You begin to love and hate your candidate. You see how much effort they’re putting in at great personal cost and you just want them to win so badly to make all of that worthwhile. At the same time, they lied to you about how much door knocking they did and they said something stupid at a public event and snapped at you for getting them the wrong coffee. At that point, you want to yeet them into space.

And you have to be the balanced, sensible, rational one…despite all of the above being the exact reason you’ve lost your tenuous grip on reality and your own sanity.?

I’ve laughed. I’ve cried. I’ve screamed. I’ve sworn. I’ve stormed out of campaign meetings in a huff, only to have to sheepishly return 20 minutes later and apologise.

It’s hard.

But if you’re lucky, that’s the worst of it.?

The last week personified

If you saw the news last week, you saw ACT Liberals Leader Elizabeth Lee do the modern day equivalent of the Mark Latham handshake and flip the bird at a journo in front of a camera and her traumatised media advisor. See above image.

Whether it killed the Liberal Party’s chances of breaking the 27-year government stronghold by Labor we’ll never know.?

Those people unsure of her as a leader, could have seen that momentary snap as the hallmark of someone not ready for leadership and run screaming. By the same token, there were probably plenty of people who saw it as nothing more than a funny moment where the media got the spray they deserved.

No matter what you think about it, there is one simple truth. The last week of an election campaign is horrendous and Elizabeth Lee is the high-profile evidence.

We can’t expect people to behave rationally when we chuck them in a pressure cooker for months on end and then just keep needling away at them. For every awkward exchange you see between a candidate and a journo or an aggrieved member of the public, there are thousands of others you don’t see. It takes a toll.

While almost all of us have given the one fingered salute to someone giving us the shits at one time or another, we’re not usually political leaders and we don’t do it in front of a media pack.?

She did something completely human and understandable in the pressure of the last week and I bet right now she is absolutely hating herself, wondering what could have been.

I feel deeply sad for her and I sincerely hope she is being looked after by friends and family.

This is a human being, suffering. We can all be kind.

Look out for each other in the last week

With just days to go in the Queensland state election campaign, I sincerely hope that we can all remember that candidates and their campaign teams are human beings working at a frenetic pace for an extended period of time of time.

And I hope that you might understand a little more just how much pressure everyone is under.?

The saddest part, is that for the vast majority of those involved in the campaign, they’ll wake up the day after the election with a result they didn’t want. Across 93 electorates and more than 400 candidates, more than three quarters of them are going to be disappointed.

Nothing hurts more than watching a good candidate work their guts out and lose on your watch.

Some of them go in knowing they can’t win but even in the most hopeless race, there’s a point where you see a glimmer of hope. You have to, otherwise getting out of bed to trudge through another day of campaigning becomes absolutely impossible.

It’s hard to reconcile the fact that even the most well-executed campaign with all the right messages and all the nodding, smiling people taking your how to vote card can end in a loss. And that’s if your candidate doesn’t snap and give a journo the finger on camera.?

So, spare a thought for the campaigners. Even if you hate what they stand for and hope they lose…they’re an essential part of democracy and they’re doing their best.

To all the candidates, particularly the Pathways to Politics for Women alumni, breathe deep, lean on your team and don’t give anyone the finger. It’ll just be easier that way.?

All opinions are my own and don't reflect those of my clients or partners.