How to Win an Election

The 2019 Australian election produced a surprise result showing, not for the first time, that every election is there for the taking – including the next one. Here are the ten steps to winning an election. We have a democracy that performs relatively well, but many Australian elections are very close. So-called ‘unloseable’ elections are lost, reminding us that every election is a real contest. In this indispensable book drawing from years of close-up observation and analysis, historian and political journalist Chris Wallace draws out the ten essential steps to winning an election. The learner’s error, she argues, is to grasp onto a couple of factors – so-called ‘conventional wisdom’ - without considering a full suite of winning factors and tracing the connections between them. Wallace notes that even when a couple of factors are significant in an election scenario, small improvements elsewhere can make the difference between winning and losing if performance and professionalism are maximised across the board. How to Win an Election is not a book designed to change your political opinion. It is a crucial resource for future political campaigns to ensure credibility, competence and accountability. Most of all, it is for party supporters and voters who can cast their vote knowing it has been backed by the best possible efforts to create change.

Dr Chris Wallace is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the School of History, Australian National University, Canberra, specialising in modern and contemporary political history. She was a longstanding member of the Canberra Press Gallery where she worked for the Australian Financial Review, the Australian, Channel 7 and ABC-TV. Wallace is the author of several books including the biography Greer, Untamed Shrew and The Private Don. She is on Twitter @c_s_wallace and Instagram c_s_wallace