This post uses publicly available data and does not divulge private MERA25 political strategy details. The purpose of this post is informational: to provide additional perspective on the 2023 Bremen state election, and to provide insights to future MeRA25 campaigns in a way that cannot be used against us or by our competition.

Did MERA25 win any parliament seats in the Bremen state election?
Unfortunately not.
How’d we do?
Not bad, MERA25 got 7,910 total votes, for .72% of all votes cast. Pretty decent for a small party running for the first time. Here’s an overview:

How’d we do with predictions? Were we focused on the right districts?
This is a mixed bag. The MERA25 political strategy team decided to focus on youth voters aged 18-25 that voted Left or Green in 2019, and with this in mind, using census data and 2019 state election results I recommended four districts to focus on: Neustadt, Östliche Vorstadt, Mitte, and Findorff. What we see is that our focus on these districts paid off, as we did the best in these districts, which does tell us that what we did worked to an extent. However to answer the second question: my opinion is that this strategy needs to be tweaked.

How do you think we should tweak our strategy, and why?
Looking at the chosen key districts, we can see they’re Green and Left strongholds, and neither MERA25 nor other small parties were able to sway enough of these voters. These districts are less likely than the average district to vote for a small party, while they’re twice as likely to vote Green or Left, and roughly equally likely to vote FDP. Campaigning in these districts was certainly not a waste, as Neustadt and Ostliche Vorstadt alone made up over a third of our votes, but I do not think this strategy was optimized. We’re a small party with limited resources which we need to make count. For this reason, we must invest our time and energy in a way which produces the most votes. My suggestion: add population to the scale.

We want votes. We want to not only understand our target demographic, but we want to know where they are, where they hang out, the areas most trafficked by them, and be waiting for them with posters, leaflets, stickers, and performative action. For our next campaign, let’s stick with identifying a target demographic we think our platform appeals to or can be converted, and when we identify key districts where our demographic hangs out, let’s focus on the districts with the highest population. We won 1.7% of the vote in Mitte, but got 40% fewer votes than in Ostliche Vorstadt where we only won 1.3% of the votes. This is our first election, we were previously unknown, and we got the most votes in the districts we focused our campaign on. This would indicate there’s at least an indirect relationship between our focused areas and votes won. With this in mind we might then conclude our investment in Ostliche Vorstadt is 60% more valuable than that in Mitte by looking at the returns in votes. Let’s learn from this and add population to the scale when choosing key districts next time.

Sounds good. What’s next?
More analyses to come as more data becomes available. Will also be taking a look at the data of other parties to derive some more lessons learned. Stay tuned and expect part 2 next week!

Part 2
Part 3