By Dr Masimba Mavaza | Chamisa and his team have been excited and celebrating the large crowds which have attended their town rallies. What escapes his mind is that not even 5% of the crowd that claps and cheers for him will vote for him on the basis of what they hear at a rally. Because they have heard nothing. Chamisa creates jokes and composes songs on the stage. The masses want real issues. Matters of bread and milk.
Ahead of the 2022 bi-elections for parliamentary and local government polls when CCC candidates and their excitable and excited leader held whirlwind tours and addressed massive gatherings across cities and towns his audiences scaled buildings, walls and hoardings to get a glimpse of the rising national wind blower. They listened to him with rapt attention, cheering out of turn, breaking into rapturous applause at his sharp jibes against the incumbent ZANU PF government. The crowds just went wild with Chamisa’s appearance on the podium. Did that reflect his influence over the people? Most certainly NOT. Did that mean the CCC would win? Well, NO. Did that mean all the candidates he was campaigning for in each of those rallies would win comfortably? Not really.
CCC honestly believe that a very significant number of people are convinced that the maturity of the Presidency-of Zimbabwe really doesn’t matter. Many see it simply as a popularity contest along the lines of a television reality show, where the viewers get to vote someone ‘off’ the show every fifth year. Taking that example a step further, People believe, many view the candidates as simply the face and talking head of their own group of people, kind of like the head of the “cool kids” in elementary school.
Chamisa talks about crowd size at his rallies, but big events don’t always translate to election victories. Candidates can be blinded to the state of their campaign by rallies with large crowds
It’s the most deceptive sign in politics.
Every five years, a presidential candidate gazes out over a vast crowd and convinces themselves the State House is there for the taking.
In 2022 the By-election candidate drawing the biggest and loudest crowds is Chamisa.
But size is not always a barometer of a campaign’s destiny. CCC knows better.
In fact, extrapolating electoral prospects from the size of rally crowds is often a misleading metric for evidence, look no further than the campaigns of MDC all the past elections. Chamisa thrilled thousands of people in mega-rallies in 2018!and the crowd became serious during voting and Chamisa lost.
Yet every election, candidates and aides, seeking silver linings when beset by bad polls, indulge the wishful thought that bulging rallies will mean a stampede at the ballot box.
Rallies are all about fun, festivity and funds and have little or almost no impact on the voting choices of people. A massive, bustling public meeting is not indicative of a candidate’s bright prospects. It merely means that the local organization of the party is robust or that the party/candidate has adequate funds to mobilize the local electorate to show up for a few hours in their support. The rally’s strength or success has no bearing whatsoever on how those same voters will vote. Because the choices are not dependent on what they hear at the rally but on what has been driven home through the campaign and of course on other factors like a promising leader at the helm of the party, connect with the local leadership, caste or community equations and the like.
During the primaries, massive crowds did, in fact, translate to votes. Chamisa lost to Mwonzora when they fought for the secretary general’s post at their elective congress. Despite the popularity Chamisa had at the congress he still lost.
Often, they tout that mystical, yet unquantifiable, political commodity.
“Momentum’s a word from physics that got hijacked by journalists and political operatives to sound scientific,” said Sam Wang, a professor of neuroscience who runs Princeton University’s Election Consortium. “What it means is — ‘I am excited by where I am today, I am excited by what is happening.'”
CHAMISA’s supporters are putting their faith in boots on the ground at his rallies.
This energy you are seeing in Chamisa’s rallies is why the polls mean nothing. This is a turnout election and the energy is behind registration to vote.
But history shows, that for all its faults, polling is a better predictor of electoral success in a broad electorate, than crowd size.
Still, it’s not impossible that the multitudes is a sign the grassroots uprising will confound conventional wisdom yet again. There is an exception to every rule.
St the same time Mnangagwa’s mega rallies in 2018 did turn out to be an indicator of strength and surprising competitiveness in towns where he once had a crowd of 100.000. people He ended up losing towns by a whisker but peeled rural areas out of the Chamisa’s column.
Our elections have come down to “our side” against the others, and very little attention is paid at all to the actual ramifications of political philosophy or policy. Chamisa’s failure to get in the office is a perfect example of this disconnect from reality.
We do not believe the majority of voters who gather at CCC rallies grasp even a very basic understanding of what practical policies the CCC was actually advocating, at all.
Furthermore, a significant portion of the electorate will attempt to validate their own preference between the candidates by strenuously extolling the negatives of the opposing side’s candidate. Very rarely out here on social media did we see posts that promoted the things a candidate wanted to do that his supporters thought were right, but rather the focus always seemed to be how wrong everything the other guy wanted to do was. This fact belies a very real ignorance as to what the presidency is all about, and a woefully inadequate understanding among the populace of how our system is supposed to work.
Very little, if any, practical political or policy discussion ever came up at all Chamisa actually told the electorate that he has no policy or ideology.
So where does this leave us? We do know the electorate will lean on the side of maturity which Chamisa terribly misses.
All too frequently, on any given day during the campaign, you could ask any avid supporter of Chamisa what it was that he had done or said in his 22 years career in Politics that earned him the support of his followers.
We do not wish for Mature good leaders to fail, and certainly not for our country to failing. People must continue to pay attention as best as they can, wading through the daily nonsense that passes for news and information in an effort to stay on top of things hoping that people will keep buying his stories.
Just a few months into this new CCC administration, things do not look good at all. With no disrespect or insult to the CCC. but so far it does not appear to me that any kind of cohesive, forward thinking, focused theme or approach is coming forth out of his rallies. It seem to be a ship adrift without a rudder or a captain at the helm no ideology no commitment
history shows us time and time again that a party without purpose, without direction and or leadership, is a party headed for very real trouble.Back in the early years after Independence, people were keen to listen to their leaders but hardly had the opportunity. Speeches by the prime minister or president trickled in on the radio on special occasions like Independence Day and Republic Day or in case of an emergency. There was no way of seeing or listening to them up close like we do in the age of social media. But because the communication was so restricted and the platforms so limited, leaders as well as voters took public rallies far more seriously. Leaders were careful about what they projected before the audience. They weighed their words, knowing they would be held accountable for their statements. It was also their primary image-building exercise and hence they were cautious not to make irresponsible statements, unlike leaders today who have the luxury of explaining their bloopers during speeches at rallies and public meetings by tweeting or posting on Facebook or issuing a press statement.
Rallies have also lost their appeal as the communication gap between the voter and the candidate stands bridged today. Voters get to interact directly with their leaders on Twitter and Facebook and through live interactive videos across platforms. Technology has enabled the voter to reach out directly to the topmost leaders in the country, who have learned to use social media platforms to their advantage. While young and old alike use smartphones today and are connected with the larger community through popular platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube, in several households where the elderly are not familiar with technology, they depend on second-hand information from the youth in the family. The youth influence decision-making by relaying trends and moods they pick up through social media.
Every time the leader follows someone on Twitter, he also manages to reach out to that entire community, region or profession. It appears as though he has a direct connect with the masses and this portrays him as a people’s person. Social media has effectively rendered public rallies redundant because the leaders have several other channels of communication that are more personal and intimate. The impersonal nature of public rallies does not help in creating any connect with the
Moreover, not all rallies can be held on a Sunday or a holiday and elections are scheduled such that they do not happen around festivals. On working days it is next to impossible to get people in the metros to skip work and turn up for a rally during the day.Their vote
are held in the evenings, by when people are tired after a hard day’s work, especially with all the big city commute. Even in smaller towns, it is very difficult to mobilize voters on a working day. In the summers, crowds get restless during the long wait ahead of a leader’s arrival at the rally and the organizers are only too eager to tell you about the anxiety they go through while holding the people back. Yet politicians love their moment in front of a massive gathering. Rallies also help political parties amplify their campaigns, especially those around known leaders or popular national leaders. It gives them good publicity, value for money I would say, as news channels are keen to livecast speeches from rallies of key leaders.
The opposition is making their case should they lose the elections they will argue that it has been rigged. They will wood-wink the people with the masses who graced their rallies.
They would want the people to believe that rallies reflected votes and this they should be the barometer of election results.
It is common world wide that masses at rallies have nothing to do with the people who will actually cast the vote.
So do mot be petrified by the excitable yellowsians. Their bubble is like the fire fuelled by paper it will soon die down. But for ZANU PF the bubble is real.