Silent campaign passes most voters by
ELECTION IS MARKED BY RISK-AVERSE CAMPAIGNS, TARGETING OF PEOPLE WHO CAN BE WON OVER IN KEY SEATS
With less than two weeks to go, the UK election campaign feels strangely flat and low-key, playing out, in fits and starts, in the background; passing most people by.
The election remains in deadlock, with Labour and the Conservatives within a fraction of a percentage point of each other, but neither with any momentum at all.
Their vote has solidified, but it hasn’t grown. The polls now find very little switching between Labour and Conservative, each with the backing of around a third of voters. The other third don’t like either main party, but the working assumption remains that many of them will — grudgingly, unwillingly and probably resentfully — end up voting for whichever of the two parties they dislike, or fear, the least.
Message discipline
Part of the quietness, and the absence of dramatic moments that often bring campaigns to life is precisely because of the tightness of the race. The campaigns are extremely risk-averse. Message discipline is tight and campaign grids are sacrosanct. No one wants to make a mistake. Interventions are tightly scripted and tactical.
The net effect is that, though each side will feel their campaign is running smoothly, there is no drama, electricity, or rhythm. Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York famously said that “we campaign in poetry and govern in prose”.
But this election campaign is all prose and no poetry.
Another reason the election doesn’t seem to dominate things in the way that past elections have done, is the almost total absence of advertising. Billboards all over the country that used to be plastered with party advertising — and the booking of billboard sites was one of the most critical parts of election campaign planning. Newspapers used to be laden with adverts too.
Election advertising has been all but killed off by the combination of declining newspaper readership and the emergence of social media, the campaign spending cap introduced in 2000 and the growing preference in campaigns for narrowcast messaging. All of this adds up to a campaign that is less noisy, less eventful and much less visible.
A lot of resource and much of the most significant campaign activity is silent and invisible, using big data to identify the voters who could be won over in the constituencies that might change hands: micro-targeting, with tailored messaging channelled through social media.
The Labour Party’s approach is more orthodox — “four million conversations in four months”, as Ed Miliband puts it. Lord Ashcroft’s polling of, now, nearly 200 individual constituencies shows the effectiveness of Labour’s ground war. Voters in the battleground constituencies report far higher levels of contact from the Labour campaign than from the Conservatives.
Unfortunately for Labour, analysis of the Ashcroft data, comparing these contact rates with the voting intentions of people in these places, reveals that this impressive effort is not translating into votes.
The swing to Labour is lower than the national poll swing in just as many of these constituencies as the swing is higher than what the national polls imply; the correlation is literally zero.
This is quite a challenging insight for all the parties. If knocking on doors, delivering leaflets and having conversations on doorsteps doesn’t help bring voters your way, what does?
It is much harder to measure how effective micro-targeting is. If the focus is hundreds of individuals rather than particular wards, or demographic blocks, it is perfectly conceivable that even constituency-level polls would not pick up any movement that may be occurring.
If, as the results start to come in on the night of 7 May, the Tories are winning more seats than the form-book suggests, it will be at least in part because their sustained, silent, targeted campaigning has worked.