Leeds North West 2019 Political Campaign Strategy
Learn how one of our team organised a winning election campaign and turned a marginal seat into an 11,000 vote stronghold.
In 2019, Innovate team member Lauren McDonald worked as campaign organiser for Alex Sobel MP. Alongside a team of volunteers Lauren delivered a political campaign strategy that resulted in a resounding majority of nearly 11,000 votes. This is the biggest in the seat for any MP since 1964. No other Labour MP has achieved it at all.
"Labour too often neglect local campaign organisation, which I believe is a craft and those that do it well are craftspeople, and we often fail to value them in the Party and in British Politics in general.
If you run a standard Labour Party campaign without implementing any local innovations or utilising community organising then it is really no different to how we campaigned 20 years ago."
- Alex Sobel MP
Leeds North West is a fascinating constituency. One with poverty and affluence, with youth and old age. With liberalism and conservatism. Holding the seat in the face of an ultra-parochial opposition and huge Brexit divisions - which saw gains in the local and European elections for both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats - was always going to be a huge challenge. Lauren McDonald, alongside the MP's Agent Nik Rutherford, built a strong foundation based on extensive local knowledge of the constituency to implement innovative tools to influence voters and implement an effective strategy based on targeted data and messaging.
Their full account is published in the pamphlet: Marginal Holds, which tells the story of how, against the odds and on a bad night nationally, they won a tough Parliamentary seat for Labour with an historic margin.
