A BRITISH ELECTION still means knocks on the door and uneasy garden-path chats. You’re settling down to the new season of “The Crown” when democracy intrudes in all its irritating vulgarity. If you tell the candidate you are wavering, you are in for a long conversation. If you express enthusiasm, you might end up with a poster in your window and a spell rapping on doors yourself.

Street-by-street canvassing is costly in terms of time and effort, consuming the lives of front-line politicians, as well as novices, for weeks. It is also a pain. At this time of year it gets dark at 4pm and—if this columnist’s experiences over the past few days are anything to go by—pours with rain 24 hours a day. Politicians have always faced dangers on the stump, such as slathering dogs and snapping letter boxes. The perils are worse in polarised times. The police recently released guidelines for candidates on how to stay safe while canvassing. Lest we forget, Jo Cox was murdered by a far-right fanatic during the referendum campaign of 2016.

Why do politicians still engage in pavement politics in the age of the internet? Haven’t the guys in Silicon Valley invented magic algorithms that can target every conceivable demographic? Some of today’s canvassing techniques are strikingly similar to the sort described in Anthony Trollope’s political novels of the Victorian era, with spending promises taking the place of free alcohol.

The answer is partly that canvassing provides parties with local knowledge. Banging on doors is not only the best way to identify your supporters. It is also the best way to gauge degrees of warmth or hostility. Waverers can be targeted for another visit. Get-off-my-lawn types can be written off. Old-fashioned canvassing works seamlessly with modern technology, as canvassers use apps such as Mini VAN Touch that allow them to feed doorstep responses into a central database. These data are then used for the get-out-the-vote effort on election day, when thousands of volunteers will make sure that “definites” get to the polling station and “persuadables” are given one last push.

Even more important is the fact that canvassing forces politicians to look voters in the eye—to deal with their constituents as individuals, rather than as concocted stereotypes such as “Workington Man”. This columnist spent a little time following Sam Gyimah, a former Tory rising star who sacrificed the safe seat of East Surrey to stand as a Liberal Democrat in marginal Kensington. Mr Gyimah explained that a lot of what he was doing was “pushing waverers into my column” (Kensington is full of rich people who dislike both Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader). He spent a remarkable amount of time chatting to wavering voters, vanishing for such a long time at one point that his fellow canvassers worried that he had been kidnapped. The hard slog is made up for by magic moments. One door he knocked on was opened by Sir Tim Sainsbury, a former Tory minister and donor, who gave Mr Gyimah his endorsement (and a big cheque).

Mr Gyimah points out that his new party has 120,000 members, three-quarters of whom have joined since 2015. They are younger than the Lib Dems of old, and fired up about the Brexit debacle. He also points out that his new party is polling twice as well as it was at this stage of the race in 2017. But for all his enthusiasm the most important battle across the country is between Labour and the Tories. Who is doing better at old-fashioned pavement politics?

The blunt answer is Labour. The party has far more members than the Conservatives—perhaps some 540,000 (though the figure is disputed at the margins) to the Tories’ 160,000. It has a Praetorian Guard of Momentum members who are capable of doing exactly what their name describes: arriving en masse in marginal constituencies and giving the local campaign a shove. Momentum is particularly proud of its “decapitation” strategy of targeting senior Tories with less-than-impregnable majorities, including Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford and indeed Boris Johnson in Uxbridge.

Labour has also done more than the Tories to select candidates who look like their constituents. Parties of all stripes have long parachuted high-flyers into winnable seats, none more so perhaps than New Labour, which sent the Miliband brothers of Primrose Hill to South Shields and Doncaster. But this is more of a problem for the Conservatives than for Labour. For one thing, the party’s membership is concentrated in the south, whereas Labour’s members are more dispersed. What’s more, fielding outsiders reinforces the stereotype that Tories are out-of-touch snobs. Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party has favoured candidates with deep local roots, such as Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy, over androids with PPE degrees from Oxford. Local roots matter most in the north, where regional identities are more pronounced than in the south-east.

Labour has also done better at preserving long-standing traditions of street politics while embracing innovations. The great parties used to have rival political gatherings in the north, the Durham Miners’ Gala for Labour and a Northumberland Pageant in Alnwick Castle for the Tories. Whereas the Pageant died long ago, the Miners’ Gala marches on. Labour has created a new class of £3 ($3.90) supporters in order to boost its numbers. It has also outsmarted the Conservatives in using the internet to organise people on the ground. The Tories got into trouble with the Electoral Commission in 2017 because they paid to bus in supporters to target constituencies. Labour used a free ride-sharing app.

Who’s there?

The Conservatives are well ahead in national polls. They are also showing signs of making the gains in the north that they regard as crucial to winning a majority. This columnist has found a lot of support for making Brexit happen and a great deal of hostility to Mr Corbyn. “I’m a moderate Labour supporter, so I’m voting Liberal Democrat,” said one teacher in Bishop Auckland, matter-of-factly. Whether Labour can use its superior ground game to frustrate the growing expectation of a Tory victory is another matter. ■

Dig deeper:

Our latest coverage of Britain’s election