Flaws in DA’s strategy in battle for votes
WITHOUT knowledge of the intimate DA decision-making processes, perception of the party’s direction may indicate three major strategic flaws:
1. Messaging
It is incomprehensible that the DA leadership can even consider, even for a moment, that a white can criticise the management of a black government, repeatedly, incessantly, harshly, and gain purchase among the mass or multitude of ordinary black voters. Even black voters in complete or partial agreement with the DA’s criticism are repulsed, often unconsciously(!) by the optic and the entrenched perception of prejudice, real or imagined. It is political insanity. The fact that the criticism is on point, and justified, does not enter into the equation. The fact that it is regularly a black voice criticising is, in fact, even more damaging, as the black critic is perceived to be a functionary of that “white boss”.
“In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Although the marketplace of ideas is a great place to shop for policies, the marketplace that matters most is the marketplace of emotions… The data from political science are crystal clear: people vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings; not the candidate who presents the best arguments… The US Republican Party dominates the key policy debates because they have developed a political language that generates powerful emotions in the minds of voters whereas the Democrats have traditionally relied on appealing to voters’ rational thinking.” (Neuroscientist Drew Weston, in The Political Brain.)
The DA needs a new poster boy with a new message to be seen to speak to the masses.
2. Race
Race doesn’t matter? The DA accepts that race matters, but the DA claims better insight into how race inequality should be addressed. The DA probably intends its race messaging to confirm its root egalitarian principles, yet the only message heard is that race does not matter.
Apartheid is not ended. The fact that any South African can sit on any park bench, unless the park entrance fee is unpaid, is not apartheid ended. South Africans, all South Africans, live in apartheid. Apartheid spatial planning remains real, some 30 years after the abolition of the Group Areas Act. Only economic empowerment will alter SA’s spatial reality, and it will be generations before the release from this particular Robben Island is effected.
3. Positioning
The general perception that the DA regards the FF+ as its main political competitor indicates that the DA relies fully on the growth of the EFF to force the ANC into a coalition with the sole other real political power of note: the DA. The DA has no illusions of any majority. Perhaps the DA has no illusions even of increasing its vote substantially. The DA appears to work to continue to represent a majority of white and coloured voters to position itself as a kingmaker. It is a decent strategy, and a realistic one. The success of a future ANC & DA coalition will be judged by those governed by it. The monster allowed to be fed to force a political marriage of the DA’s desire, a stronger EFF, may be the most destructive political strategy South Africa can possibly fear.
| JOHNNIE WESTRAADT Brackenfell