How are local campaigns organized in Ireland given the multimember constituencies? Like suppose I am one of thee Fine Gael candidates in a district where we only expect to win one or two seats.
If FG only expect to win one seat there are highly unlikely to be three candidates. The usual formula is (number of seats you're sure of + 1).
In theory...
In practice.
Yes, especially so in rural constituencies.
Ah that makes sense. What is there to stop candidates from sandbagging their teammates? I know if I was the odd one out in my seat I'd be tempted to attack my own team.
Doing so in public would be suicidal as the party would presumably punish that candidate, but things can get pretty heated in private meetings where they decide how to allocate their resources. I'm very familiar with the Fine Gael strategies for vote sharing, they make a huge effort to maximize their seats by splitting the vote equally. Take Dublin South (now Dublin Rathdown), my own constituency. They managed to squeeze 3 seats out of 36% in 2011 because they split the vote equally, whereas Fianna Fail only managed 2 with 41% in 2007 because they didn't seem to make the effort. Fine Gael do insider polling to help decide how they should campaign. They do also do a lot of district splitting, even here in Dublin. Door to door campaigning is huge here, and by splitting things up the actual candidates can appear at quite a large proportion of houses in the constituency.
