How strategy borrowed from Vote Leave wooed voters to Tories
Use of focus groups, polls and targeted messages led to massive majority for Boris Johnson campaign
THEY were the lifelong Labour voters on whom Jeremy Corbyn was supposed to be able to rely, even if he failed to sell his vision to new converts.
But to Dominic Cummings and Isaac Levido, the masterminds of Boris Johnson’s landslide victory, they became known as “Persuasion Ones”: a category of voter whose allegiance to Labour had been profoundly shaken by Mr Corbyn’s leadership and his party’s involvement in blocking Brexit. Ultimately, the identification and targeting of those voters helped caused an electoral upset that shocked even some of the Conservatives’ most senior figures.
The phrase emerged from some of the most intensive use of focus groups and polling ever seen in a UK election campaign. The approach taken by Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) mimicked the constant testing of public opinion that took place under Mr Cummings’ leadership of the official Vote Leave campaign in 2016.
“About a week or so before polling day it became really obvious that so many more of the people CCHQ labelled Persuasion One, or Labour Leavers, were coming in our direction than anyone else,” said one of Mr Johnson’s 109 new MPs, who was elected in the North.
“These were people who voted Leave, who didn’t like Jeremy Corbyn, and were just fed up of the way politics had been conducted over the last few years, with nothing getting done.
“Many of their views were very Conservative, but traditionally and culturally they have always been anti-Tory. Conversations with those people were the best use of our time.”
By polling day, the Conservatives were so confident about mobilising their own base in many Midlands and northern seats, that in many cases the “get out the vote” to mobilise known Tory supporters, was replaced with a door-knocking campaign aimed at the new set of voters flocking to the party.
One campaigner in the Midlands said: “In a conventional election like in 2015, on polling day we were getting out solid Conservaive supporters.
“But this time we were doing the higher risk strategy, as we saw it, of knocking up Labour Leave voters. At every single door we were getting the same answer: that people were longtime Labour voters, but were this time voting Conservative because of Brexit.”
The new northern MP added of his own experience: “All they had ever done was vote Labour and the idea of voting Tory was a taboo for them.
“Turning up on their doorsteps felt like we were giving them permission to break that taboo. At the same time the local Labour Party seemed blissfully unaware how much they had alienated their core vote. We were all knocking the same people to encourage them to get out to vote.”
The Tories’ strategy was, in part, hiding in plain sight. In September, after Mr Johnson had lost his working majority in Parliament, and Mr Cummings was quietly mapping out an election campaign, he was asked by reporters to set out his “next move”. “You guys should get out of London,” said the 48-year-old campaigner, who was born in Durham. “Go and talk to people who are not rich Remainers.”
Behind the scenes Mr Cummings had been doing just that – in a process he had started way before agreeing to become Mr Johnson’s Downing Street aide in July.
“Before coming back into government he regularly toured the country, travelling from place to place with his ears pinned back and his mind open,” James Frayne, the founding partner of Public First, an opinion research agency, writes on these pages. “Like all the best political strategists, he wanted to see the public as they actually were, not how he wanted them to be.”
Mr Frayne states that “get Brexit done”, the key phrase of the Conservatives’ campaign, “had such huge potency and such wide appeal that it can only have come out of the mouth of an
‘These were people who voted Leave, who didn’t like Jeremy Corbyn, and were just fed up with the way politics had been conducted’
ordinary person, probably sitting in someone’s front room, or a mid-market hotel suite, somewhere like Nuneaton or Warrington.”
Behind the door of No10, Mr Cummings was pushing for an election that he was convinced would break the parliamentary deadlock and deliver the majority Mr Johnson needed to deliver Brexit, and much more besides.
Indeed, the antics of MPs attempting to scupper the UK’s exit from the EU would help the Conservatives to unite the pro-Brexit vote that swung behind Vote Leave in 2016, Mr Cummings argued.
On Oct 29, when MPs finally agreed to Mr Johnson’s demand for an election to “break the deadlock”, Tory aides were told that the campaign would be run by Mr Levido, the 36-year-old Australian strategist who had been working at CCHQ, having helped the Liberal
Party secure a “miracle” victory in the Australian election in May.
Mr Levido, a protégé of Sir Lynton Crosby, the veteran campaign guru, oversaw the targeting of a 50-strong list of seats and another of constituencies that the party would focus on defending. Throughout the campaign, its messages and potential moves were extensively tested on target voters, including via a highly effective digital campaign run by Sean Topham, 28, and Ben Guerin, 24, from New Zealand, who ran a similar operation under Mr Levido during the Australian campaign.
Also hiding in plain sight was Mr Cummings’ description, in a blog post last year, of the importance of getting “your message in front of people as close to the decision point as possible”. “That’s why we spent almost the whole campaign testing things (via polls, focus groups, online) then dropped most of our marketing budget in the last few days of the campaign. Similarly, Robert Cialdini wrote one of the few very good books on persuasion – Influence – and ideas from that informed how we wrote campaign materials.”
In this case, Mr Cummings was referring to the 2016 Leave campaign, but the lessons on “persuasion” stuck.
Together with Lee Cain, another former senior Vote Leave figure and now Mr Johnson’s communications chief, Mr Cummings and Mr Levido drew on the success of the pro-Brexit campaign to do just what he had been arguing the Conservatives could do: reassemble the type of cross-party coalition of voters that shocked the establishment by backing Leave in the first place.
They were joined by Michael Brooks, the head of research at Sir Lynton’s CTF Partners, who was up at 3am each day to crunch data from polls and focus groups. Mr Levido was at his desk beside Mr Brooks by 5.20am each day, in time for a meeting with key staff at 5.40am. The Final Countdown by Europe was played daily for staff ahead of a team meeting at 8.30am, before finally being replaced by One Day More from Les Misérables.
Private polling conducted by Hanbury Strategy, a firm co-founded by Paul Stephenson, another Vote Leave veteran who was the campaign’s communications director, showed that the strategy was working.
With a combination of the Tories’ national messaging, and the perception Labour voters held of Mr Corbyn and Brexit, many candidates in the Midlands and the North found themselves pushing at open doors. Another new MP in a northern seat said: “CCHQ were providing us with lists of people who had voted in only one in 10 of the
Thursday night in No10 alongside Carrie Symonds, his girlfriend.
Speaking in Downing Street on Friday afternoon, the Prime Minister thanked those who had “voted for us for the first time and those whose pencils may have wavered over the ballot”. A tired but jubilant team of Tory aides looked on, among them Mr Cummings.
The first new MP to report to Parliament to pick up his brand new security pass was Greg Smith, John Bercow’s replacement as MP for Buckingham.
Now, a crucial task will be finding a way to retain the support of those who voted for the Conservatives for the first time last week.
Robert Largan, an accountant who overturned Labour’s 2,000 majority in High Peak, Derbys, said: “We have got to deliver now. A lot of these people have taken a huge step and if we let them down it could unravel quickly.”