By GEOFFREY CHIYUMBE –
A POLITICAL rally is a gathering at which people of “similar” political beliefs listen to speakers or musicians. Political rallies are often high energy events that are used to raise morale and support—the energy and warmth is inspirational.
When huge crowds, mainly misunderstood to mean party supporters, turn out in such numbers, campaign rally organisers feel it is a sign of people’s strong resolve to vote for their party.
However, it is worth noting the saying that in politics, crowds and votes don’t tally. “A campaign rally is not a ballot box”.
We have seen the truth to the above statements here in Zambia especially since 2006 all the way through to the January 2015 presidential by-election. And so we don’t need to overemphasise their meaning.
“We are entering the season of crowdsmanship, counting up the people who gather to see the presidential candidates on these autumn days,” political columnist Hugh Sidey observed in a Life magazine article in September 1968.
“The prehistoric political ritual is being practised in 1968 with fresh fervour.”
Unlike some political reporters today, Sidey wasn’t fooled by all the hype, observing, “It is almost worthless as a campaign measure in this age. It may even be worse – it may totally mislead the contenders and the country.”
In this time of political rallies in Zambia and more so as we head towards the August 11, 2016 general elections, many questions have arisen regarding the images we are presented with as Zambians on social media and also mass media showing huge rally turnouts even in areas where the total population does not match what is presented in the image.
Are these crowds for real? Are these images deliberately tampered with, manipulated, and re-sized? Are they the same crowds going to every rally? Is all this to work on people’s minds/psychology in order to prepare people for the alleged electoral malpractices if applicable? What about the talk or claims of rigging?
The rally venue or site is a physical space which is fixed and limited as far as the number of people it can accommodate.
But when one looks at the image presented that has been altered, there is an exaggerated occupied space beyond the reality.
One cannot afford but to conclude that many activities behind the scene are happening involving manipulation and resizing of the area and actual images by the campaign teams using image editing software such as, Photoshop, to mislead the masses.
Photoshop is an image editing software developed and manufactured by Adobe Systems Inc. Photoshop is considered one of the leaders in photo editing software.
The software allows users to manipulate, crop, resize, and correct colour on digital photographs.
All political party leaders organising rallies expect huge turnouts, which boosts their morale as they consider it an indicator of their popularity.
So why do people attend rallies and what kind of people are these?
First of all, the message of hope is one of the things those who attend like to hear.
We see a mix in terms of age; young ones, middle aged and older ones.
Some are registered voters while others are not.
The attendants are categorized into three groups; campaign rally party supporters, those from the other political camps and the neutral group.
One group is ferried from wherever to the rally venue by the organizers to increase the numbers with the promise of a meagre payment in kind through cash or beer or even campaign materials like party regalia such as chitenge.
Some attend just to hear what the other opposing camp is promising the electorates.
Some in attendance are simply there to pastime, while some attend to just go and have a physical look at the individuals they have just been hearing about who they haven’t seen in person. In short, they attend to just have a glimpse.
In reality, rallies are staged for among other reasons, to motivate and demonstrate that a given party is popular.
The party spinners then Photoshop these pictures to sale to the public the idea that they are indeed popular, basing the judgment on the photo-shopped picture or image.
One of the primary principles behind the staging of a rally is to gather as many people as possible to show how much support a particular party has.
Ideally, this will in turn generate publicity through the mass media, depending on the numbers, the issue, who is speaking, etcetera.
Rallies also educate, stimulate further action, raise money, energize supporters, serve notice on the opposition, and help build coalitions.
However, rallies involve a number of potential problems and these include sensitivity to weather as it is common knowledge that dad weather has potential to lower the turnout precipitously.
Considering that numbers are important, a poor turnout can be disastrous politically (it may appear the cause has little support, thereby encouraging your opponents) and emotionally (organizers and supporters who do show may be demoralized).
Even a good turnout does not guarantee mass media coverage.
In addition, rallies are often long, usually have too many speakers and not enough music.
The speakers frequently say nothing new and the whole event is passive and evokes a party-image atmosphere to many onlookers.
The message of the campaign contains the ideas that the candidate wants to share with the voters.
It is to get those who agree with their ideas to support them when running for a political position.
The message often consists of several talking points about policy issues.
The points summarize the main ideas of the campaign and are repeated frequently in order to create a lasting impression on the voters.
However, even if the message is crafted carefully, it does not assure the candidate a victory at the polls.
In a modern political campaign, the campaign organisation or “machine” will have a coherent structure of personnel in the same manner as any business of similar size.
A campaign team, which may be as small as one inspired individual, or a heavily-resourced group of professionals, must consider how to communicate the message of the campaign.
Campaign advertising draws on techniques from commercial advertising and propaganda, a mixture also dubbed ‘politainment’.
The available avenues to political campaigns, when distributing their messages is limited by the law, available resources, and the imagination of the campaigns’ participants.
These techniques are often combined into a formal strategy known as the campaign plan.
The plan takes account of a campaign’s goal, message, target audience, and resources available.
The campaign will typically seek to identify supporters at the same time as getting its message across.
In today’s world, the Internet is now a core element of modern political campaigns.
Signifying the importance of Internet political campaigning, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign relied heavily on social media, and new media channels to engage voters, recruit campaign volunteers, and raise campaign funds.
The campaign brought the spotlight on the importance of using Internet in new-age political campaigning by utilizing various forms of social media and new media (including Facebook, YouTube and a custom generated social engine) to reach new target populations.
For example, during Obama’s recent presidential campaign, Internet political campaigning was supposedly effective at reaching the younger population as they remain engaged with social websites and new media.
Because of the limits of technology, Obama’s Internet campaign failed to reach older generations who didn’t use this new media, as well as significant amounts of the population who didn’t have access.
However, as modern technology continues to adapt to changes in society, Internet campaigning will never be able to serve as a complete replacement for traditional political campaigning without reducing the significant barriers to entry.
Internet political campaigning leaves out entire portions of each population because it only is accessible to a certain portion of the population, leaving those without this access disconnected.
Crowdsmanship (exaggerating the size and meaning of rally crowds) is an age-old ritual in presidential races near the end, when crowds often do grow in size and intensity.
Campaign spokespeople then develop — or spin – the growing size of their rallies into a narrative about a groundswell of support for their candidate and the reporters following them often adopt those narratives.
The history of crowdsmanship is one disaster after another as evidenced by Zambia, which has not been alone in this reality.
For example in the USA, Harry Truman at first failed to attract crowds in 1948 and so his defeat was taken for granted.
In the last weeks of the campaign, when the folks began to turn-up, the pundits simply refused to believe it.
Those traveling with John Kennedy in 1960 raised crowdsmanship to new heights, cataloguing jumpers, squealers, runners and leapers and believing that the huge throngs who had gathered to see Kennedy surely represented every warm body in the United States.
There was considerable shock on election night when Kennedy won by only 119,000 votes, as Lyndon Johnson came down to the wire in 1964, his crowds became small and indifferent, while Barry Goldwater’s hot partisans still ripped the roofs off all over the country.
Lyndon Johnson got the biggest margin in history.
As president, when he still travelled the country, Johnson presented the paradox of getting larger and larger airport crowds all the while his national popularity was slipping.
Johnson would not believe the polls and the advice of political leaders that he was in trouble.
He insisted that he could tell by the faces that the country was with him.
It happened even with presidential campaigns involving Obama and Romney.
Spokespeople for Obama and Romney were bragging about the size of their rallies and pointing to the enthusiastic crowds as an indication of growing support.
Consider this piece in Political from Oct. 12: “It may be his supporters, or it may be those getting a glimpse of the GOP nominee for the first time, but Mitt Romney’s crowds are getting bigger in the campaign’s final stretch.
Romney’s campaign has apparently taken crowdsmanship one step further, however, altering on Instagram a photograph of a recent Nevada rally, making the crowd appear much larger than it actually was.
‘All the boasting and exaggerations of campaign flacks, and the creative work of Photoshop artists, should give political reporters pause. Many of them live in a protective bubble supplied by the candidate, so it’s understandable that they will occasionally be susceptible to the spin.
But that makes it all the more important to be careful and resist the urge to read too much into the size of campaign crowds in the waning days of a presidential campaign.”
Even losing campaigns, it seems, are adept at turning out huge crowds as Election Day approaches.
In 1988, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis lost badly to George HW Bush, but still attracted large crowds in the campaign’s final days.
Consider the New York Times article from November 5, headlined, “Hailed by Big Crowds, Dukakis Foresees an Upset.”
John Kerry lost a close race to George W Bush in 2004, but still drew large crowds at the end.
In fact, it seems the only candidate in recent memory not to draw large crowds to rallies at the end of his campaign was John McCain in 2008.
As the New York Times reported on October 25, 2008: “The McCain campaign says no one should read anything into crowd sizes. Still, Mr McCain drew a spare crowd in New Mexico.
Crowd size doesn’t necessarily translate into votes, but on a Saturday nine days out from election day, it does say something about voter enthusiasm”.
Despite ample evidence to the contrary, it seems that candidates and their campaigns are wedded to the idea of the campaign rally not only as indicator of growing support, but as one of the most important tools for voter motivation.
But the fact remains that the size of a rally is not always a good indicator of momentum. Larger crowds don’t always translate into larger election day victories.
The journalists trailing President Edgar Lungu, the Patriotic Front (PF) candidate, and his United Party for National development (UPND) Hakainde Hichilema, including all other political players in this coming general election, would be wise to read Hugh Sidey’s 1968 “crowdsmanship” piece in Life and consider the long history of candidates who shamelessly exaggerated the size and meaning of their rallies.
Ideas to improve people’s living standards should be the basis for the campaign.
No need for some political candidates to be behaving as if they have already won the general election just because they have promised people heaven on earth and based on many meetings and huge rallies as a suggestion of victory at the general elections since people get easily swayed by big crowds attending these political rallies.
The enthusiasm is very dangerous as it is highly likely to disturb the peace if the results are announced contrary to their hallucinated expectation.
As we have seen, pulling large crowds at political rallies is not a guarantee of victory and that most people thronging these rallies do not have voters cards. Most are school going children and many just go
there out of curiosity.
Therefore, as we come to the hype and heading toward the end of the campaigns, we keep in mind what the period has offered us as we look to the actual results and we sincerely hope that all will accept the outcome of the elections and not become violent blaming rigging on the basis of the huge crowds they attracted and also the images they photo-shopped to mislead many people of their popularity.
Let us therefore all go out in numbers on the August 11, 2016, and achieve a 100 per cent voter turnout in all the 10 provinces.
Let’s go and vote for peace, development and prosperity for mother Zambia in the spirit of one Zambia one nation to move our country into even to greater prosperity.
In defeat we congratulate the winners and in victory we acknowledge the competition rendered by the loser as we regroup and focus on the next general elections to be held in 2021.
Remember, as Mahatma Gandhi said: “All through history there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always!”. No need for violence.
There can only be one winner and we congratulate them as they straight away settle down and start delivering on the promises to better the lives of Zambians.
And as Steinbeck said, “Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some wmade small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory”.
Also as a reminder to both the would be winners and losers are the following words made by John F Kennedy on April 21, 1961 during a news conference: “Victory has hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan”.
The author is an energy expert by profession with many years of experience within the sub-Saharan region.