Agreed. To your point:

Strategy to win national elections:
(1) Maintain a database of reps & votes. Identify the swing voters (Regionals, smaller airlines and Canadians).
(2) Look among your new hires pilots to identify friends of swing voters & recruit them to attend the BOD in various capacities
(3) Hold those who attend accountable. Report conversations back to the "war room." No swing voter should ever drink or eat alone. Buy pizza for underfunded MECs. Talk about their issues. Find out what they need for their group. The regional pilots and minority groups (smaller # of pilots) take the BOD very seriously.
(4) Provide feedback to your candidate and if they are smart, they will craft their presentations to satisfy the swing votes. Your candidate needs to be up at 4:30 to 5am; meet voters before breakfast when they are fresh.
(5) Loop back around your contacts. Get vote commitments. Your adversaries are playing the same game. You will lose your votes if you do not maintain the relationship.
(6) Identify voters who did not keep their word using your database tools. Talk to them. Get your candidate to talk to them.

We did the opposite: We fired the people who had run successful campaigns, isolated and offended them to the point that they ran a candidate against our own candidate. Then we took a bunch of military bro's who stood around and talked to each other. The perception was that Delta had gone stupid and was no longer effective. The swing voters went to FedEx (which fielded a pretty weak candidate) Either of the Delta candidates would have been better. It was ours to lose and we took ourselves out.