Too Early

I’ve been hearing that a lot lately. When you’re working on an election that takes place in November, and you’re busting your hump to make it a victory one of the most frustrating things you can hear is “It’s too early,” which is usually followed by something like “people aren’t even paying attention yet.” If you’re really lucky, you will be given some suspect little anecdote about how campaigning, especially canvassing, before Labor Day directly led to someone losing an election.

To be clear – this is utter c - - p.

We’ve gone over this before, how time is the one resource you can never get back.
By putting off hard core campaigning until some arbitrary date, you are merely throwing away your most valuable resource. But anyone who has done more than a few campaigns has gotten this same, ridiculous lecture. Sometimes, a particularly destructive person will even try to interfere with your efforts – going to campaign meetings and publicly trashing the idea of campaigning before Labor Day or sending out emails to all their friends in the area explaining why no campaigning should be taking place until this arbitrary date has passed.

Let me be perfectly clear – you are not starting too early. Chances are, unless your started in January of the year before your election, you have are actually getting off to a late start. Your campaign “begins” the minute you know you are standing before the electorate. Putting off the actual business of campaigning is quite simply procrastination.