The term war room, in political parlance, was coined by the team of U.S. strategists (specifically James Carville) who worked for Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in the early 1990s. In a nutshell, a war room is a political command centre where a candidate’s strategists and media officers work to counter attacks by opponents while gathering research to mount an offensive in an ongoing, immediate fashion.
Warren Kinsella’s The War Room profiles and analyzes some of the best political warriors and spinners around. He employs personal anecdotes, political wisdom culled from his extensive experience on Liberal Party federal and provincial election campaigns, historical examples from other Canadian and American campaigns, and generous amounts of humour to deliver a book about what it takes to survive challenges not just in politics but in any kind of business or non-governmental agency, whether it sells music, movies, cars, or computers, or raises money to preserve the environment, combat cancer, or save animals.
In election campaigning period, WAR ROOM is most important. Its the place where we focus on all the activies going on in the constituency from all the political parties, candidates and accordingly plan the strategy for the future. To setup a WAR ROOM, we need computers, networking, data analyst, hardware engineers, and staff to work on it. We help candidate to arrange everything in their desired premises.
There are three basic kinds of war rooms in political campaigns. This is based on our experience, so it may differ for state or local races:
Decision-making war room: This is a set-up where you have the core decision-makers for a campaign working in one room or in close proximity. This allows the campaign to make decisions and act quickly when they see a threat or opportunity.
Media-monitoring war room: In a media-monitoring war room, you typically have a room of 8-12 intern-level staff watching, capturing and alerting to staff all media activity. This stream of information is typically followed by a dedicated member of the communications staff, often the Rapid Response team who then act to shape media coverage and the campaign message.
Election-day war room: On Election Day, the action shifts to get-out-the-vote, and the center for monitoring this is the election-day war room. This is typically run by the Political Director of the campaign, and is composed of the regional political directors in charge of different swing regions. The goal here is to get an early sense of the votes and devote resources through election day in different directions as needed. Each constituency has vote targets, and meeting all targets is how you win.
The commonality to all three is that they are essentially about information mobility. War rooms are catalysts for decision-making, and they do this by getting information to the people who need it in real time or by having the decision-makers convened to facilitate action.