Lord Ashcroft built a ground operation under Stephen Gilbert's direction that that was more targeted and professional than any ever mounted by a British political party. Gilbert's team knew that the earlier and longer that candidates were selected the more chance they had of unseating incumbent MPs. Advantages of incumbency had grown because of the extra taxpayer-funded communication allowances that MPs had enjoyed ever since Labour came to power. Candidates had to run their campaigns according to audited business plans. Battleground seats were heavily polled and then target voters were identified by the best consumer profiling software. By the time of the election the Conservative Party had built a database of 2.5 million swing voters in swing seats. They were then direct mailed on the issues that mattered most to them. Cameron signed letters on immigration. Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague signed letters on Europe. All of the methods for the battleground seats had been road-tested in local elections and in the three parliamentary by-elections of Cameron's leadership, all won comfortably by the Conservatives. This included the technique of directly rebutting negative attacks on the Conservative Party once it had been established by phone canvassing that the attacks were causing harm. In the final months of the campaign the literature in target seats focused on three top issues: the economy, the NHS and immigration.
The Tory ground war was as focused as the air war was unfocused. Results suggest that the party won 21 more seats than if the national swing had been averaged evenly across the nation. Twenty of those seats (Montgomeryshire being the exception) had been part of the target seats programme although further research will be needed to establish the exact contribution of the programme.
