The Play Book: Article 1, Building Coalitions of Support.

You do not win elections by talking only to the faithful. How campaigns build support across different communities, interests and local pressures

In a marginal seat, your core base of supporters matters, but it is not enough. You can fill a room with loyal supporters, stack a street stall with party regulars, and still lose if you cannot build a broader coalition across the electorate.

The Play Book is a series about power, how it is built, how it is maintained, and how it is exercised during an election campaign. It goes behind the slogans, the corflutes and the carefully staged photo ops to look at the machinery underneath. Not the polished version campaigns sell to the public, the real one. The one built from field plans, factional discipline, volunteer support, message control, local relationships and relentless repetition.

At the centre of that machinery sits the Australian Labor Party, one of the oldest and most formidable political organisations in the country. Love it, hate it, or work inside it long enough to do both before lunch, the ALP is a machine in the truest political sense of the word. It is not just a party. It is an institution, a network, a culture, a campaign apparatus and, when it is working properly, a disciplined instrument for winning and holding power.

This series draws on my personal experience as a field organiser in the most marginal federal electorate in Australia.

From the outside, elections are often framed as contests of ideas and personalities. From the ground, they look different. They are contests of structure, labour, timing, trust, local knowledge, and the ability to build coalitions of support that extend beyond your core base of supporters. Every flyer, every script, every booth roster and every street stall sits inside a larger logic. This series is about that logic, and the forces at play behind it.

That brings me to the purpose of this Article.

You cannot win a marginal seat by speaking only to the people already inclined to agree with you. A campaign can have a loyal base of core supporters, a recognisable well known and liked candidate and a room full of committed volunteers, and still fail.

To win, consistently and repeatedly you need to build a coalition of supporters broad enough to hold together different communities, different priorities and different reasons for backing you, all without making the whole thing look stitched together with chewing gum and wishful thinking.

In an ultra marginal seat like Gilmore, building a coalition of support is not a branding exercise, it is the work.

The pressures in Nowra are not always the same as the pressures in Kiama.

The instincts of long-term South Coast locals are not always the same as recent arrivals; Retirees, public servants, young families, coastal professionals and small business owners may all live in the one electorate, but they do not all experience politics through the same lens.

A campaign that talks as though the whole seat is one neat block of voters will usually learn the hard way that it is not.

That is why a coalition of support matters. In practical terms, a coalition of support is a group of different communities, with different interests and different motivations, who each decide there is enough in common, enough trust, and enough value in backing the same candidate or party.

Crucially they do not need to agree on everything. They do not need to speak in the same political language, in fact they don’t even need to speak the same language. But they do need to believe that their concerns are being heard, that their community is being taken seriously, and that they have a place inside the broader story the Candidate is trying to tell.

The campaign material from Gilmore makes that logic plain. It does not treat the electorate as one single audience. It breaks the seat into communities with real pressures.

Young families in and around Nowra are approached through service delivery, family life, local infrastructure, competent government and cost of living support. Tree changers and families in Kiama, Gerringong and Gerroa are approached through a different mix, sustainability, infrastructure, environment and the quality of local amenities. Public servants in the southern end of the seat are understood through another lens again, wage pressure, public service cuts, and a sense that government decisions do in fact land in real homes and budgets.

Even at the broader strategic level, the campaign frame is built around bridging long-term residents, recent tree changers, and public service retirees, groups with different lived experiences but some overlap in values and local identity. That is not accidental. It is a recognition that in a seat like Gilmore, the path to victory runs through a coalition of support broad enough to hold those communities together.

The geographic logic from the campaign tells the same story. The path to victory is not described as simply turning out rusted-on supporters and hoping the rest takes care of itself. It is about securing gains in Nowra and surrounding areas, winning back support in Moruya and Batemans Bay, and maintaining strong support in Kiama, Gerringong and Gerroa.

That is a map of coalition-building. It is seat maths translated into campaign strategy. Different parts of the electorate are being told different things because they are living different realities. A serious campaign does not pretend otherwise. It tries to understand where support is soft, where it is strong, where it can be expanded, and what kind of local message can bring those pieces into alignment.

The issue mix reinforces the point. At the macro level, the concerns identified in Gilmore include local roads, disaster recovery and resilience, health, cost of living, energy and environment. At the micro level, local projects and place-based issues matter too, sporting complexes, surf club upgrades, community batteries, EV chargers, the sort of things that might look small to someone in a national campaign war room but matter a great deal if they shape how people experience whether their town is being invested in or ignored. Coalition of support politics lives in that overlap between the broad pressures people share and the local specifics that make them feel seen. If a campaign can connect those two levels, it has a chance. If it cannot, then it is just broadcasting into the void with better fonts.

This is also where a lot of outside commentary on elections misses the plot. People talk about “the message” as though there is one perfect sentence that unlocks the whole seat. There isn’t. There is a campaign frame, yes. There are common values, yes. But underneath that, the work is more granular and much less glamorous. The Summer Pack material talks about persuasion lists, scripts based on research, localising those scripts, and reaching target voters through quality conversations. That is what building a coalition of support looks like in operational terms. It means working out who you need to persuade, what they care about, how those concerns fit into the larger campaign frame, and then doing the deeply unglamorous labour of showing up enough times that the message starts to feel credible rather than imported. Coalitions of support are not announced into existence. They are built conversation by conversation, contact by contact, street by street.

That matters even more in a seat like Gilmore because ultra marginal electorates punish laziness. In a safer seat, a campaign can get away with talking mostly to its core supporters. In an ultra marginal seat, an echo-chamber politics is electoral poison.

You cannot just feed the base red meat, roster the faithful onto booths, and hope momentum appears by divine intervention. You need enough of your base to provide the volunteer labour, morale and organisational muscle to keep the campaign running. But then you need more than that.

You need the young family in Nowra who is worried about local roads and school facilities. You need the retirees in Moruya who want Healthcare and Aged Care support. You need the tree changer in Kiama who care about sustainability, renewable energy, and infrastructure are keeping up with the needs and growth of the community. You need the long-term local who wants to know whether anyone in politics still understands the local area as it actually is, not as a consultant’s demographic spreadsheet says it ought to be.

That is the point of a coalition of support. Not everybody enters through the same door, but enough of them end up in the same room.

That was not abstract theory for us in the ultra marginal seat of Gilmore. It was the daily logic of the campaign. We were not dealing with one neat voter bloc waiting to be activated by a clever slogan. We were dealing with an electorate spread across distinct towns and regions, each with its own mix of pressures, loyalties and local grievances. The internal planning reflected that reality. The campaign strategy broke the seat down by place and by demographic, identifying young families in and around Nowra, tree changers and families in Kiama, Gerringong and Gerroa, and public servants in the southern end of the electorate as key audiences, each with different issue priorities. Cost of living, housing, health and local roads mattered strongly in Nowra and surrounds. Health, environment, energy and energy costs mattered strongly on the northern coast. Health, housing and cost of living were central for public servants in the south. Even the broader message framework was built around the idea that long-term residents, tree changers and public service retirees might not see politics the same way, or even see each other the same way, but could still be brought into a broader coalition of support through shared values and a common local frame.

That shaped how we worked. Building coalitions of support in the ultra marginal seat of Gilmore meant starting from the assumption that the electorate was not one audience. It was a map of overlapping communities. In practical terms, that meant different conversations in different places, without losing the coherence of the broader campaign. In Kiama and the coastal north, conversations often turned quickly to environmental protection, development pressure, health, aged care, childcare and the South Coast Rail Line. In the Bay and Basin and Jervis Bay villages, roads, maintenance, access and service delivery kept resurfacing. In Nowra and Bomaderry, cost of living, council underdelivery, roads and transport infrastructure sat much closer to the surface. In the Eurobodalla, health infrastructure, Batemans Bay hospital services, disaster resilience and local recovery had their own weight. The point was never to pretend these concerns were identical. The point was to build a coalition of support by taking them seriously enough that people could see themselves somewhere inside the campaign, even if they came into it through different doors.

A lot of that work happened through direct voter contact, because coalitions of support are not built from the office printer alone. The campaign material repeatedly stressed direct voter contact, persuasion lists, target SA1s (statistical area level 1), scripts based on research, and the need to localise those scripts so campaigns could reach target voters through quality conversations. That was not theory for us. It was the operating manual. Mobile offices, street stalls, community walk-arounds, doorknocking and phone banking were all meant to do more than just show the flag. They were how you tested messages, heard recurring concerns, and worked out whether a broader coalition of support was actually being built or merely imagined.

The mobile office program was an important pillar of community engagement, valuable because it allowed direct meet-and-greet contact and stronger personal connections with constituents. Doorknocking was also integral, with locations chosen strategically based on persuadability, not just convenience. In other words, the campaign understood that in the ultra marginal seat of Gilmore, contact had to be purposeful. You go where support can be expanded, not just where applause is guaranteed.

That matched my experience on the ground. You could feel the difference between mobilising your existing base and building a genuine coalition of support. Mobilising the base is familiar work. The people know the language already. They know the party. They know the talking points. They turn up in red shirts, they nod in the right places, and they often need little persuasion beyond being asked to do one more shift or hand out one more flyer.

Building coalitions of support is different. It means talking to people who are not hostile, but not yet convinced. It means hearing the same frustrations repeated in different accents and different class registers. It means noticing that one voter is talking about the price of groceries, another about a local road that has been left to rot, another about whether their parents can get healthcare close to home, another about overdevelopment, another about rail, another about whether politics still has any practical relationship to daily life at all. After a while the patterns stop looking random. They start to reveal the architecture of the electorate.

That is where the campaign documents were useful, because they helped translate anecdote into structure. The zone analysis for the electorate did not just list booths and swings. It paired different parts of the seat with their primary local issues, from roads, rate rises and rail in Nowra, to aged care, health and development concerns further north, to Batemans Bay hospital services and coastal erosion in the south, to the Jervis Bay flyover and road maintenance in the villages. The numbers mattered, but so did the issue map sitting underneath them. You could see the shape of the coalition of support the campaign needed to build. Not one made from abstract ideology, but one built from place, need, memory and practical delivery. In a seat that had been held by different parties over time and remained knife-edge close, that local issue map mattered because Gilmore voters had a history of rewarding candidates they believed would work hard and advocate for the region. The internal assessment put it bluntly, Gilmore voters do not simply vote Labor or Liberal, they vote for a hard worker. That insight matters because it tells you what kind of coalition of support is even possible in the first place.

The field strategy followed the same principle. The campaign identified persuadable suburbs for doorknocking, including places like Gerroa, Gerringong, North Nowra, Bomaderry, Kiama and Jervis Bay. That is revealing because it shows the campaign was not only thinking about strongholds or danger zones. It was thinking about where persuasion could actually change the arithmetic. The same logic appeared in the wider field material from the party, which directed campaigns to work from priority SA1s, persuasion call lists and policy lists, then localise scripts in consultation with organisers. By the time we were doing field work, the broader lesson was obvious.

A coalition of support in the ultra marginal seat of Gilmore had to be built deliberately. It could not just be inherited. It had to be found suburb by suburb, issue by issue, and then held together by a frame strong enough to span those differences.

There was also a human reality to this that strategy documents only partly capture. The volunteer base mattered enormously, but it also had limitations. Internally, the campaign noted a list of around 800 volunteers across Gilmore, but also that the average age of the volunteer base was 76, that many would not door knock or phone bank, and that younger activists were often relied on for higher-energy field work. That matters because coalitions of support are not just built from message. They are built from organisational capacity. If your field effort is thin, your ability to build and maintain a coalition of support is thinner still. The same documents noted difficulty meeting door knocking and phone conversation targets, hesitation around volunteer recruitment, and resistance around expanding field operations. None of that is glamorous, but it is real. The machine does not run on mythology. It runs on labour, on follow-up, on calendars, on who can make the calls, on who can stand in the heat at a mobile office, on whether you can actually reach persuadable voters often enough to shift sentiment. Coalitions of support are political, but they are also logistical.

The digital side of the campaign was part of this as well. The planning material recognised that different groups lived on different platforms and cared about different issues. Facebook was seen as the best path to older women, while Instagram reached more of the 30 to 50 bracket. The stated aim of online communications was to demonstrate local presence, spread the message, draw supporters into volunteering and fundraising, and create shareable content. Again, that is coalition-building logic. Not because social media wins elections on its own, it doesn’t, but because a coalition of support in the ultra marginal seat of Gilmore had to be reinforced in multiple places at once. On a screen, at a mobile office, in an email, on a call, at a market, on a doorstep. Repetition matters, but repetition without localisation is just noise. The strongest digital guidance in the pack insisted that campaigns should stay on message while still reaching target voters with content that felt natural and understood by real people. That is another way of saying the same thing. Coalitions of support are built when people recognise themselves in what they are hearing, not when they are spoken at in a generic campaign dialect.

What I took from all of this, working inside the ultra marginal seat of Gilmore, was that building coalitions of support is less about ideological purity than about practical political assembly. You identify the communities you need. You learn what pressures shape their view of politics. You work out where those concerns overlap. You build a story broad enough to contain them without flattening them into mush. Then you do the long, repetitive work of earning trust. Sometimes that means talking about health. Sometimes roads. Sometimes housing. Sometimes disaster resilience. Sometimes simply showing up often enough that people stop seeing the campaign as a temporary intrusion and start seeing it as part of the local fabric. That is how a coalition of support is built in a seat like this. Not in one speech, not in one ad, not in one week of campaign theatre. In accumulated contact, in local credibility, and in the hard discipline of treating an electorate as it is, rather than as you wish it to be.