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Momentum’s strategy hangs on three key pillars: people power, the targeting of marginal seats, and the idea of getting everybody to step up.

It’s been said before and it’ll be said again: the Conservatives are the party with the money and the media on their side. What they lack and what we have in abundance is a movement. Literally tens of thousands of people are willing to give up their time to go out and carry the message of what a radical Labour government can do to transform society. So we really need to harness that people power and that energy — and that’s a core part of our theory of change.

In terms of targeting marginal seats, we saw that in 2017, this method helped us flip a lot of seats, and we had some very unexpected victories. We know we’re living in politically volatile times, so there’s less certainly than there once was in regard to who will win these seats. Last time, there were eleven constituencies that were won by fewer than a hundred votes, so this year we’re being very targeted in our campaigning.

To that end we’ve recently launched a new app called My Campaign Map, which is like My Nearest Marginal on steroids. Whereas the 2017 version informed people of their nearest marginal seat so they could go out canvassing there, this new app is much smarter. It’s more data-driven, and it will be using a number of different metrics to continually update activists about where they can make the biggest impact when campaigns are taking place there. We’re now able to prioritise seats that need more attention, and encourage more people to get other and campaign; this should mean we’ll have a more even spread of activists in marginal seats across the country.

“Stepping up” refers to Momentum’s volunteer-run “distributed organising” model, which draws on the experience of a range of decentralised political campaigns, among them the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016. Stepping up refers to the understanding that to bring about the sort of change we need — and winning this election is obviously a core part of that, but not the end point — we’re going to require everybody on side. There’s no way that a simple staffed campaign can pay enough people to actually get a team on the scale we need to win.

In that spirit, a recent initiative has been the launch of Labour Legends, which asks people to take a week or more off work or study, to campaign for Labour — ideally in the fortnight leading up to the election. We will then help to place people where they can make the biggest impact in that time. The idea is that a Labour victory isn’t going to just happen for us. We need everybody to step up and make it happen.