Sheinbaum’s campaign manual: tennis, backpack and a lot of walking
While Morena defines who will lead the electoral battle in the key states for 2025, Claudia Sheinbaum gave a single instruction. One that sounds like a neighborhood council, not a palace strategy.
This Thursday morning, the president recalled López Obrador’s old advice. The magic formula according to the former president: “good tennis shoes for walking and a backpack for the drivers”.
“My only orientation is: the best way to promote yourself in a territory is house to house,” said Sheinbaum with the conviction of someone who has lived it. “Not even the big spectaculars, it’s house to house.”
There is no room here for complicated theories or sophisticated digital campaigns. The message is earthly, almost primitive. Sheinbaum speaks from raw experience.
He recalled his own campaign for the delegation leadership in Tlalpan in 2015, when Morena debuted at the polls. Their knowledge of the territory was minimal, barely 3%. The solution was as simple as it was exhausting.
“I toured on foot, and it is the largest delegation in the city on foot,” he said. “I was first promoting Morena because I couldn’t promote myself personally.”
That image says it all: an unknown candidate, a new party, and miles of asphalt ahead. There were no shortcuts.
Now, ten years later and as president, he repeats the same recipe to his troops. It is as if time had not passed, as if surveys and communication teams did not exist.
Why this obsession with the basics? Because in politics, what wins elections is still direct human contact. The greeting, the look, the hand that knocks on a door.
Sheinbaum knows it. He lived it in his worn out shoes. And now he demands that his coordinators replicate that sweaty formula.
In the Mexican political theater, where each movement is calculated to the millimeter, this instruction seems anachronistic. But perhaps that is precisely its strength: remembering that in the end, politics is made with people. One by one.
