An inside look at campaign war rooms

Running a political campaign takes a lot of organization.

There are mountains of flyers to print off and hand out, signs to make and put up, and plenty of maps to carefully keep an eye on.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic has cut down the activity in campaign war rooms.

Carla Beck, the NDP candidate for Regina Lakeview, said she and her team have to keep safety in mind at all times.

Anyone who enters her campaign office has to sign their name, their phone number and when they entered the building to help with contact tracing in case someone tests positive.

The usual measures like masks, physical distancing and hand sanitizer are also required.

However, even though it isn’t quite as packed or noisy as it would be in a normal election year, they still manage to get a lot of work done.

“Every day we have volunteers coming in to help us do things like deliver pamphlets, do canvassing, do odd jobs around the office … So it’s really a team effort here,”  Beck said.

“It’s a little different than it was in 2016, but we still have a nice team atmosphere.”

Over on the other side of the aisle, they are facing similar changes.

Sean Osmar is the campaign manager for Megan Patterson, the Saskatchewan Party candidate for Regina Lakeview.

“Because of COVID, we’re keeping our office personnel pretty bare bones. We’re a skeleton crew. If people aren’t out door-knocking, we have them working from home, whether that’s making phone calls or helping put together the literature packages,” he explained.

“It’s a little more subdued.”

Walking into both offices, the walls are lined with campaign signs, maps and posters.

NDP candidate Carla Beck at her campaign headquarters. (Dominick Lucyk/980 CJME)

One of the most important strategic tools is the map of the Regina Lakeview riding, which shows each house in the constituency.

“We’re very proud of the fact that we’ve already knocked on all of the doors in the riding and we’re on our second go-round,” Beck said.

However, it’s not just the classic door-knocking that needs to be organized.

“We’re trying every method possible — social media, phone calls, door-knocking, everything,” she continued.

Campaign manager Sean Osmar, at Megan Patterson’s campaign headquarters. (Dominick Lucyk/980 CJME)

Osmar said while on the outside it might seem like a major operation, it all comes down to one thing.

“There’s no grand scheme to campaigning other than just talking to people — knock on doors, do what you need to and talk to them,” he said.

Both campaigns have gone through thousands of pamphlets, dutifully dropped into prospective voters’ mailboxes.

“It’s non-stop over (at the printing press). Probably every two or three days, we make a run over there for one reason or another,” Osmar said.

While both teams spend hours planning to make sure everything goes off without a hitch, sometimes things go wrong out on the campaign trail.

It has been smooth sailing so far for Beck this year, but she remembered an incident from her campaign in 2016.

“It’s a pretty high bar (to reach) … I had my truck stolen from behind our campaign office with a lot of my campaign material and my good door-knocking gloves inside … So, hopefully, that’s not a bar we reach this campaign,” she said with a laugh.

Patterson is running for the first time, but she has already had quite the hiccup while campaigning.

“There are a lot of dogs in the city,” she said. “Everyone has a dog, which is great … I’ve had my kids out (on the trail) with me a couple of times, and one of my children got bitten by a dog … But he was back out there the next day.”

All of that work will pay off for one of the two candidates on Oct. 26, when people head to the polls for the provincial election.