You're a challenger with four weeks. The incumbent has the city, the donors, and voters who already know the name. No persuading anybody, no case to make. The incumbent only has to run out the clock.
Not plus. Times. A voter you persuaded who stays home is worth nothing, and neither number wins a ward alone.
You start under-mobilised, because that's what a challenger's coalition is. You can lead on paper all month and lose on the night.
Undecideds drift to the incumbent every week, on their own. The mayor needn't do anything to earn it.
A block walk's real job is turnout. It finds the people already on your side and makes sure they vote. That's where nearly all its value is, and it's the most effective way there is to lift turnout.
This is the settled finding of the field research: a knock on the door moves people to act, not to change their minds.
It converts almost nobody. The stranger who wasn't going to vote for you mostly still isn't after you've knocked. A handful come across, no more.
So a ward full of undecideds you've never persuaded is a ward the door knock can't win for you. There's no base there to turn out yet.
This is the part the game is quietly strict about, and it's the part most players get backwards. Turnout is a multiplier on the base you already built. A ward you persuaded but never mobilised gives you a fraction of what it should; a ward you mobilised but never persuaded has nothing to give.
Each week you pick a focus neighborhood and spend your plays. Plays and dollars are both tight, and the campaigns that lose here spent a turn on something cheap instead of something useful, or a fortune on something they could have had for free.
The best turnout in the game and nearly the cheapest. Nothing else drags your existing supporters to the polls like a knock on the door, and that turnout is what beats a machine.
The second half of every winning campaign: once a ward is persuaded, this is how you cash it in.
One ward at a time, and it only pays if you've already built support there. Walk a ward of strangers and you're turning out a base that doesn't exist yet.
The volunteers walk for nothing, but the turf, the lists and the literature don't, and a brand-new campaign is short of volunteers anyway.
The strongest pure persuasion for the money. When a ward is thick with undecideds and you need them moved, this moves them.
It rewards a candidate people warm to, and it's cheap enough to run in a week when the chest is thin.
No turnout at all. It creates support and does nothing to make sure it votes.
A ward full of people who like you and stay home is a ward you lost, and it will look like a win right up until the count.
The cheapest play, and the only cheap one that touches every ward. It's turnout at a distance: thinner than a door knock, but it lifts your base across the whole city at once.
The move for a week when your support is spread out and you want to nudge all of it toward the polls.
Thin. It does a fraction of what a block walk does in the ward that matters.
Spread across a city, that's a lot of effort landing in wards you were never going to win.
Persuasion at scale, and it reaches the people who'll never come to a coffee morning. Roughly twice the punch of a phone bank, in one play.
It needs no volunteers at all, which makes it the reach play for a campaign that hasn't built a field operation yet.
Expensive, and it only converts undecideds who are still there.
Send it in the last week, after the soft vote has broken, and you've posted a fortune into six wards with nothing left to give.
The biggest persuasion hit available, because you're talking about the one thing the city already cares about. Every town has a wound; this is you pressing on it.
It cuts through in a way a generic event never does.
Pricey, one ward, and no turnout. It creates want, not votes.
And like all persuasion, its value decays as the undecideds vanish.
Cheap, and it reaches specific congregations wherever they are, regardless of your focus ward.
Some candidates carry real weight in those rooms, and for them this is far better than it looks on the tin.
You don't aim it. It goes where the churches are, which may not be where the race is.
And behind the wrong candidate it's close to a wasted turn.
It persuades nobody and it's still one of the most important plays here. Being known slows the drift that's bleeding you every week, and being trusted decides how the toss-up wards break.
It also puts a shield up against the mayor's next attack, which is coming whether you're ready or not.
It costs no money at all, but it still costs a turn, and turns are as tight as the war chest.
You'll finish the week and see nothing happen. That's the hardest thing about it, and it's why players skip it and then wonder why the undecideds keep walking away.
Name recognition is the brake on the drift, and that's real. It puts you everywhere at once, and being everywhere is how an unknown stops being unknown.
There is a version of this race where nobody has heard of you and this is the fastest way to fix that.
The most expensive play in the game, and it converts nobody.
The press interview buys you more of the same thing, plus credibility, plus a shield, and it is free. You are paying a fortune for the worse half of a play you could have had for nothing.
The only play that takes votes off the mayor instead of finding you new ones. It peels their support where they're strongest, and raises your credibility on the way past.
Against a machine boss, this is the weapon the whole campaign has been waiting for.
Two plays out of twelve, and here's the part that decides races: against a beloved incumbent it backfires.
Swing at a mayor the city is fond of and the city turns on you. Same play, opposite result.
Before the first week you choose who you're running. This is not flavor. Each candidate is genuinely better at one part of the campaign, which means the play that wins for one of them is a wasted turn for another. Pick the candidate, then build the campaign around what they're good at, not the other way round.
For the organizer, block walks and phone banks turn out the base harder and cost less. The best mobilisation in the game, cheaper and stronger, in the hands of the one candidate built to knock doors.
The outsider gets the cheap ground too, plus a College District that lights up for him.
Neither of them fills a war chest easily. The money lane is closed, so the whole plan has to be turns, not dollars.
Lean all the way in. A cheap ground game you don't run enough is the same waste as an expensive one.
Fundraising fills the chest faster and deeper than for anyone else. On a candidate whose money lane actually pays, the field office and the shelf stop being luxuries and become the plan.
This is the one candidate who can out-infrastructure a machine instead of out-walking it.
Raising money still costs turns, and a week spent dialing for dollars is a week you didn't spend at the doors.
Buy the infrastructure early or the money advantage never has time to compound.
Carol lands church outreach twice as hard, so a cheap fixed-ward play becomes a real weapon. Maria is trusted on sight by school families and the civic middle, converting harder in the wards where they live, and those are the heavy wards.
Theo makes oppo research his craft, digging up the story where others come up empty. Sam starts with the council already warmer, a head start on the endorsements that swing a close ward.
Each edge only fires when you actually use it. Carol behind a candidate who never runs church outreach is a wasted strength; Theo who never digs is just an average challenger.
Read your own candidate before you read the board, and steer your plays toward the lane they own.
A play that plays itself, every week, in every ward, without ever spending one of your twelve turns.
Buy it in week one and it works four times. That's the whole reason it's worth what it costs.
A large slice of your entire war chest, up front, in the week when you can least see what it's doing.
Buy it in week four and it works once. You've paid a fortune for a single turn.
The ad blitz is the fastest name recognition in the game, which is the brake on the drift. Rapid-response mail hits the mayor's strongest ward every week without you lifting a finger.
Internal polling quietly makes your focus ward better at converting, for the rest of the race.
You can't have them all. The shelf is longer than the budget, and every dollar here is a dollar not in the plays.
Everything recurring is a bet on the weeks you have left, and four weeks is not very many.
A ward you persuaded and never mobilised gives you almost nothing, and it'll look like a win right up until the count.
Twelve plays all game, and a war chest that won't cover a full ground campaign and the infrastructure both. Block-walk every ward or open a field office; raise money or knock doors. That trade is the game.
The drift takes voters off you every week for free. Being known and being trusted are the only brakes, and neither shows up on the poll you're watching.
Against a machine boss the knife works. Against a mayor the city loves it turns in your hand, and the clock runs faster too.
Lose, and it is usually because you persuaded a ward you never turned out, or you let the clock run, or you swung at a mayor people liked.
Persuade every ward in the city. Lead the poll all four weeks. Then watch the night, when the people who liked you stayed home and the machine's people did not.