How Might The Greens Miss This Moment?
Alex is a researcher with RedBridge Group and a political strategist/consultant adviser
Theoretically, the Greens could be in a position to go on the offensive and take enough seats at the next election to force Labor into minority Government.
If you look at all the seats that flipped at Fed22, there was an unequivocal progressive shift. The Libs only picked up two seats - from the UAP’s (ex-Lib) Craig Kelly, and from One Nation’s (ex-LNP) George Christensen.
At Redbridge, we’ve been speaking a lot about the profound shift in electorate sentiment - voters across all cohorts are wanting care, compassion, and vision from political leaders (as opposed to policy tinkering or piecemeal measures).
Voters keep telling us - unprompted - how much they despise the spending on submarines. The more politically engaged, who know about the Stage 3 tax cuts, hate those too.
So it would seem that Labor has been learning the wrong lessons from its historic Aston victory. It’s not that Lib voters adore Labor’s adoption of Liberal policies, it’s that progressive sentiment is ascendant.
Young people in particular (and renters of all ages) know the system is stacked against them. The cost of living and housing crises are really focusing voters’ minds.
Looking at the electoral map, the Greens certainly have demographics on their side, so what could possibly go wrong? Well, think of me as that fun friend who always has an answer to that question.
Insufficient focus on the ground game
The era of easy social media reach is long gone (that’s a topic for another Substack entry!), and even more so, legacy media’s influence among ordinary voters is receding quickly.
Social media (including paid) now offers ever-diminishing returns. Resources are far more effectively directed towards field organising and the visual presence in the electorate.
Leaving the run too late
The Greens’ success in QLD was predicated on getting the ground game happening years out from the actual election. 90,000 doors were knocked during this time.
The trajectory that nearly saw Alex Bhathal win Batman/Cooper was also a multi-year ground game effort (more on Bhathal below). The talk of an election at the end of 2024 means ground games need to start now. And this is best done by examining - and where possible, leveraging - existing community organising efforts outside of party politics.
Misreading/overemphasising the psephology and putting all the eggs in one basket
Of course, the Greens, having less money than the majors, must be careful with campaign spending. The problem is how that caution can play out.
Over-reliance on party psephologists to determine target seats can mean that crucial things get missed.
Qualitative/sentiment assessments, demographic analyses, and organising capacity can get overlooked when deciding which campaigns to fund. It also means key intra-seat factors can get missed: these can be the difference between loss and victory.
There’s also a danger in not analysing conditions that can lead to big, ‘unexpected’ swings - and these swings do happen.
The best way to avoid this pitfall is by a) using a variety of tools to assess probabilities of success and b) ensuring early ground game setup (i.e. funding organisers early across a number of seats).
This allows for real-time monitoring of electorate sentiment which could form the basis of an iterative funding model.
This would counter the temptation to pick a winner based on past patterns (when current conditions may be very different) while starving other viable seats of funding.
Messaging: being policy focused rather than vision focused
Policies can get dismantled and attacked. It’s much harder to do that with vision.
Our research keeps telling us that voters don’t want ‘quick fixes’ or piecemeal solutions, anyway. They want “bold vision” and “big picture thinking.”
They want to see that politicians have the integrity and capacity to plan beyond the next election cycle.
The rent freeze debate is a great example. This is not to argue one side or the other - and that’s exactly the point!
When the debate gets bogged down in the specifics of only one component of the housing attainability crisis, opportunities to talk about systemic reform get crowded out.
The detail itself can make voters switch off, but even worse, it can play into infuriating legacy media tropes about Greens lacking policy ‘seriousness.’
‘Seriousness’: not addressing brand weaknesses
In our research, we keep hearing voters call for policies that sound awfully similar to the Greens’ platform, but when they’re asked about how they view the Greens, often, they dismiss them out of hand as not being ‘serious.’
Our toxic, overly concentrated legacy media environment has obviously been a key contributor to this brand damage.
But we saw that start to change last year, when Adam Bandt helpfully suggested that a journo, “Google it, mate!” at the National Press Club before Fed22. It was bracing stuff because it re-focused the ‘seriousness’ narrative onto those most deserving of it.
The many excellent Greens Parliamentary performers do great work dismantling tired neoliberal arguments.
But really focusing on showing their economic chops is critical to a reorientation of the Greens’ positioning - from being a party of protest to a potential party of co-Government.
Unfortunately, there’s a reticence (among some of the Vic Greens professionals, at least) to do ‘serious’ messaging about economic matters. It’s apparently “bad for the brand” - meaning that there are supposedly branch members who might get shirty.
When branch-member composition fails to reflect target voters - or worse
The Libs' self-destruction is often attributed to religious right branch stacking which has led to their members no longer reflecting the electorate.
Unfortunately, the Greens, in certain key branches, have a comparable problem: some central branch members are older, whiter, and sometimes wealthier than the young, diverse renters who comprise their target voter demographic.
This results in all sorts of problems - from organising (because like attracts like), to damaging fights over cultural issues. It took too long for the Victorian Greens to rein in the anti-trans contingent, for example.
Sure, the party is structured in a way that can make these things procedurally challenging, but there was nothing stopping all key figures from delivering immediate, unequivocal messaging that anti-trans crap has no place in the party.
We saw what happened with the Alex Bhathal travesty: a candidate who had worked herself to the bone over multiple election cycles and was set to win, had her campaign derailed because of preventable party infighting. The entire party suffered from absent leadership as the mess was playing out.
A generational opportunity in Batman/Cooper was squandered.
It remains to be seen what the party will do with today’s generational opportunity. So many Australians - and future generations - are counting on the party… coming to the party!