- Campaigns win elections, not election day. The real story unfolds months before voting through strategy, data and voter outreach.
- Context comes from historical data. Past turnout and vote shares reveal whether campaigns are truly shifting support.
- Ground campaigns beat spectacle. Door-to-door engagement and community organising matter more than rallies or crowd sizes.
- Social media isn’t voter sentiment. Viral posts and trending hashtags don’t necessarily translate into votes.
- Political reporting should follow the campaign, not just the count. Cover the strategy, organisation and mobilisation behind the result.*
As South Africa gears up for the 4 November local government elections, newsrooms across the country are slipping into election mode.
We’ll cover campaign launches, manifesto promises, opinion polls and rallies. Then we’ll spend election night analysing turnout, vote shares and coalition negotiations before explaining who won, who lost and what it all means.
But I’ve begun to wonder whether we’re covering the wrong part of the story.
During my years at the SABC, election coverage revolved around voting day and the count that followed. Later, as a foreign correspondent, the pattern became even more obvious.
I’d often arrive in a country two days before election day, collect my accreditation, decide whether to base myself at the Electoral Commission or at one of the main party headquarters, report on the mood before the vote, cover election day itself and then spend the following day explaining the result.
Three-day story
It was a three-day story. Or so I thought.
The irony is that campaigns are rarely won in those three days. They’re won in the months before them.
Looking back over more than two decades of covering elections, I’ve come to realise that approach has also narrowed the way we report them. We spend so much time anticipating the outcome that we devote far less attention to understanding the campaign that produced it.
Glen Mpani, group lead at the International Centre for Political Campaigns (ICPC), believes that’s one of the biggest weaknesses in modern political journalism.
“Election results are the final score. Campaigns are the story behind the score,” he says.
More than speeches
Mpani argues that campaigns are far more than speeches, rallies and manifesto launches. They involve strategy, organisation, funding, voter targeting, data, grassroots mobilisation, digital engagement and months of decisions that most journalists never see.
“If journalism only reports who won, it tells the public what happened. It rarely explains why it happened.”
I can remember countless election nights. Standing inside party headquarters waiting for exit polls. Watching celebrations erupt in one room while another fell silent. Broadcasting live as results trickled in.
What I struggle to remember is the campaign itself.
Yet that’s where elections are often won or lost.
While journalists are preparing for election night, campaign teams have often spent months analysing voter behaviour, testing messages, allocating resources, identifying undecided voters and measuring whether their strategy is working.
Look at the data
That disconnect matters because campaigns themselves have changed.
The people running campaigns aren’t just looking at rally crowds or speeches anymore. They’re looking at data.
Campaign specialist, Cynthia Manjoro, of Shikamo Political Advisory and Campaign Services, believes journalists should be paying much closer attention to three sets of numbers long before election day.
The first is historical election data.
“Journalists must analyse past election results, specifically turnout rates and party vote shares. These baselines provide the only objective measure of whether a campaign is actually ‘moving the needle’,” she suggests.
A party winning 10 000 votes sounds impressive until you discover it received 15 000 at the previous election. Equally, what appears to be only a modest increase in support may represent a significant breakthrough after years of decline.
Endless speculation
Turnout matters just as much. A party can win simply because fewer of its opponents voted. Another can lose despite increasing its share of the vote. Without understanding those numbers, journalists risk reporting the result without understanding what produced it.
The second dataset is what Manjoro calls the “missing voter”.
Rather than focusing only on voters moving between parties, she believes journalists should pay far more attention to registered citizens who repeatedly choose not to vote.
Who are they? Where do they live? Why have they stopped voting? Which parties are trying to reach them, and are those efforts working?
Those questions often reveal far more about a campaign than endless speculation about voter swings.
The third dataset is what is happening on the ground: door-to-door visits, community meetings, volunteer deployment and repeated contact with households.
Importance of manifestos
“Many journalists mistake the size of a rally crowd for genuine support for a party or candidate.”
Manjoro says rallies can be deceptive. People attend for many reasons, from curiosity and entertainment to free transport or food. Large crowds may make for compelling television, but they don’t necessarily translate into votes.
“The politician who truly understands their supporters is usually the one investing in door-to-door visits, ward meetings, and repeated contact with households, not the one obsessed with headline crowd figures,” she explains.
Television naturally gravitates towards spectacle. A packed stadium produces powerful pictures. A fiery speech makes for a compelling soundbite. But neither necessarily explains why a party wins an election.
Manjoro also challenges another assumption many journalists make: the importance of manifestos.
“Voters seldom read them.”
Instead, she argues, many voters are influenced far more by what they hear from campaigners in their communities, what they see in terms of local service delivery and whether politicians engage consistently with the issues affecting their daily lives.
Digital platforms have become indispensable reporting tools. They show us how parties are framing issues, responding to criticism and trying to shape the day’s agenda.
Viral videos aren’t votes
But likes, shares, trending hashtags and viral videos are not votes.
South Africa’s 2024 general election offered a good example.
Much of the online conversation centred on a deepfake video falsely claiming Donald Trump had endorsed the MK Party. The video spread rapidly before being debunked.
Yet while journalists were chasing the viral clip, Manjoro says the campaign data she was following pointed to something far more significant.
“A deeper analysis of internal campaign data revealed that the MK Party’s ground mobilisation efforts in KwaZulu-Natal were far more robust and strategically entrenched than the mere 8% share of media coverage suggested.”
When the votes were counted, the party won more than 45% of the provincial vote.
“This episode offers a critical lesson for the press: relying on media visibility and digital viral storms as proxies for voter sentiment can be deeply misleading.”
We often report what is easiest to see: the rally, the speech, the trending hashtag or the viral video. The quieter work of campaigns rarely attracts the same attention, even though it may ultimately determine the result.
Tell the story sooner
Mpani believes political reporting needs to rethink where it begins.
“Report elections from the polling station backwards rather than from election night forwards.”
He argues that journalists should spend more time following campaigns from the day candidates are selected, watching how parties organise, recruit volunteers, allocate resources, use data, frame messages and build local structures.
Election night will always matter. It’s the climax of every campaign. But by the time the first ballot is counted, much of the real story has already unfolded.
Perhaps it’s time political journalists stopped treating election day as the beginning of the story.
By the time the polls open, the story is already well underway. Our job is to start telling it sooner.
*Summary created by AI.
Paula Slier is an international journalist and speaker who works on information warfare, disinformation and media literacy. She has reported from conflict zones across the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
