An election campaign is often described in the grand language of strategy, messaging, and ground operations. But in reality, this vocabulary, for all its value as a tool of practice and analysis, can actually be boiled down to two simpler and more unforgiving essentials: being able to win attention, and making promises people believe.
These are the basic conditions of political competition in a crowded field in winning support from an impatient and often sceptical electorate.
The first pillar is an auction for real estate in the public mind that is finite, contested, and constantly shifting. Every party, candidate, activist, and commentator is trying to occupy the same scarce terrain of notice.
Voters are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with policy detail. They are stressed, busy, distracted, and bombarded by information from every direction even when they aren’t the targets of political marketing. In this environment, a campaign that cannot break through the noise is a campaign that does not exist in any meaningful sense. It may have policies, it may have candidates, it may even have good intentions, but if it is not seen and heard, it is politically irrelevant.
This is why campaigns effectively seek to “outbid” one another, not necessarily through money, though that’s a part of it, but through the far more valuable currency of salience.
The most successful political campaigns make themselves unavoidable. They create moments, provoke reactions, attract headlines, start social media conversations and trends, and insert their message into the various levels of everyday conversation. Sometimes this is achieved through scale with such gear as advertising budgets, rallies, and traditional on-the-ground visibility actions.
More often, and especially in the social media era, it is achieved through scalp-like cut-through: virality, clarity of message, emotional resonance, and the ability to distil complexity into something that can be repeated, shared, and remembered. What matters is not simply how much a campaign says, but how much of what it says is actually heard and retained by the voter in the democratic community.
However, as non-negotiable as this pillar is, attention on its own is insufficient, because it must be anchored in credibility, and in South Africa that credibility deficit has become starkly measurable. Polling by the SRF shows that 74% of voters associate the ANC with broken promises. For context, the party ranking second in this measure is the DA on 8%. It is worth noting how incredibly rare it is to see a gap of 66 percentage points between two parties on such a measurement.
Should worry the ANC
This figure is possibly what should worry the ANC the most as we head into election season, because it is a diagnosis of a collapsed relationship between message and belief. A party that cannot be believed is a party that cannot present a manifesto. The ANC, for so long trading on what they’ve accomplished, have lost touch with the fact that they’re record of liberation mythology and initial governance success has diminishing returns, especially in relation to this central reality of modern political campaigning: once credibility is eroded at scale, even high levels of attention cannot restore it. Now, the ANC’s election machine is greatly degraded, but it isn’t yet extinguished.
It will undoubtedly mobilise impressively to gain public attention closer to voting day. But a party can dominate headlines and still fail to persuade if voters simply no longer believe what it says.
Every campaign, whether explicitly or implicitly, is making a set of promises about the future. These promises may take the form of policies, reforms, or broader narratives about change and direction, but voters are not evaluating them in the abstract. Once aware of them, voters ask a simpler question: will this actually happen?
Credibility is the filter through which every message must pass. It is built over time through track record, consistency, and perceived intent, and it is destroyed just as steadily through failure, contradiction, and overreach. A party that promises economic growth while presiding over stagnation will struggle to be believed, just as a candidate who claims to fight corruption while surrounded by scandal will find their words discounted before they are fully heard.
It is at this intersection between attention and credibility that the most effective campaign moments are created, and it is also where they are most often misunderstood. The recent campaign stunts of Helen Zille provide a useful illustration.
Snorkelling
Directing traffic at a dysfunctional intersection, sitting with her feet in a water-filled donga, and most recently snorkelling in one are, on the surface, unusual and even faintly absurd images. They invite mockery, and opponents have been quick to treat them as evidence of gimmickry or theatrical distraction. One even went as far as to claim them as evidence of mental derangement.
That interpretation, however, misses the strategic function of these faintly ridiculous viral moments. Intentionally or not, each such stunt operates simultaneously on both pillars of a campaign.
In terms of outbidding other parties or candidates for public attention, they are highly effective. They cut through a saturated information environment, travel widely across media platforms, and become part of the public conversation in a way that conventional speeches or policy statements rarely do.
They are memorable, shareable, and difficult to ignore, which is precisely what a campaign must achieve if it is to saliently occupy space in the public mind. Yet more importantly, and despite their easily dismissed levity, these moments do significant credibility work and political heavy lifting.
Zille as the DA’s mayoral candidate in Johannesburg is vulnerable to a specific and predictable line of attack: that she is an outsider to the city, parachuted in to lecture and criticise without understanding the lived reality of the city’s decline. This is not simply a personal critique, but an attempt to undermine her ability to make credible promises about fixing the city. If she can be framed as detached or arrogant, that particular association the DA struggles with, then her message can be dismissed before it is even truly considered.
But by quite literally immersing herself in the visible failures of service delivery, standing in them, sitting in them, and even diving into them, she alters that frame. The imagery recasts her from someone who might appear a distant critic into a participant observer.
Willingness matters
Instead of appearing as someone pointing from the sidelines and relying on her track record and reputation as a globally recognized former Cape Town mayor and premier, these absurd actions present her as someone willing to experience the problem firsthand, even at the cost of appearing slightly ridiculous. That willingness matters, because it signals a form of engagement that counters the accusation of detachment.
The levity in the messaging also works well for Zille in a way that makes this exact template difficult to replicate. She comes with a formidable reputation for competence. Almost uniquely, she is under little pressure to prove to voters her seriousness. That leaves her free to venture well beyond her traditional brand, allowing her stunts to augment rather than rebalance the view in which she is broadly held.
Additionally, the humour embedded in the absurdity of snorkelling in a donga operates to not let voters too easily feel campaigned at, but rather invited into a joke. Humour allows someone to disarm by altering an expected status relationship with their audience, where typical politics, seen in Dada Morero’s frigid reprimanding reaction to Zille, entrenches the traditional setup of information being imparted rather than an experience or insight shared.
Intentional or not, Zille’s viral moments compress a political argument into a visual form that is immediately legible. They communicate that she is not above the dysfunction she is criticising, but inside it, confronting it directly. In doing so, they disarm, or at least complicate, the narrative that she is an out-of-touch outsider. Critics who dismiss these actions as trivial or unserious are overlooking the extent to which they reinforce the second pillar of campaigning by strengthening perceived authenticity and engagement.
A broader lesson from seeing this unusual campaign in action is that the two pillars of campaigning cannot be separated without consequence. A campaign that captures attention but lacks credibility may generate noise and even temporary excitement, but it struggles to convert that into durable support because voters do not trust what they are hearing. Conversely, a campaign that possesses credible ideas and a strong track record but fails to command attention will remain marginal, speaking to too small an audience to matter electorally.
Credible but invisible
Sustaining both pillars simultaneously is the central discipline of political campaigning. It requires resisting the temptation to chase attention with messages that undermine credibility, just as it requires avoiding the comfort of credible but invisible policy detail that never reaches the electorate. It demands coherence, so that what is said is heard and also believed, and so that every act of attention reinforces, rather than erodes, the perception of trustworthiness.
In the end, elections are not won by the best ideas in isolation, nor by the loudest voice alone. They are won by those who can secure a reliable and sustainable place in the public mind and persuade that same mind that what they promise is real, achievable, and worth believing.
By unorthodox means, it seems Helen Zille is succeeding in her make-or-break campaign to lead South Africa’s once-golden city.
[Image: Keenan Constance on Unsplash]
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