Abstract
Constituency campaigning has been transformed in recent elections. Many of the more traditional methods, such as volunteers knocking on doors and delivering leaflets, still take place, but increasingly there has been more direction and control from national party headquarters, more use of technology and more sophisticated targeting of individual voters. All three of these changes were in evidence in 2017 and probably to a greater degree than in recent elections, along with a larger spend than ever on digital messaging. But there were also widespread complaints about the inaccuracy of much targeting and the failure of central direction. The 2017 election was also notable for the number of candidates who complained of intimidation and abuse, often (though not solely) on social media.
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- 1.
See Mark Wallace, ‘In Copeland, the Campaign is Exposing Problems with the Tory Ground Operation’, 16 February 2017, https://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2017/02/copeland-byelection-tory-ground-campaign-problems.html.
- 2.
See, for example, Steve Howell’s Game Changer. Accent Press, 2018, pp. 139–41.
- 3.
This figure differs slightly from that in Tim Shipman’s Fall Out. William Collins, 2017, pp. 240–41.
- 4.
Ailsa Henderson and James Mitchell, ‘Referendums as Critical Junctures? Scottish Voting in British Elections’ in Jonathan Tonge, Cristina Leston-Bandeira and Stewart Wilks-Hegg (eds), Britain Votes 2017. Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 121.
- 5.
Farron believed that one reason he was doing badly locally was that local voters saw him as having deserted them to go and be a big-name politician in London. He therefore did not want to be seen in the campaign bus going into or out of the constituency, so the party had to arrange for the bus to stop outside the constituency boundary, at which point he was transferred into a car, complicating an already tortuous set of travel arrangements.
- 6.
In the final weeks, the party believed just two Lib Dem-Labour contests were even plausible: Cambridge (although, as one Lib Dem campaigner noted, ‘a week out and we knew that had gone’) and Bermondsey & Old Southwark (‘reasonable, but only because of Simon Hughes’). Both were lost by majorities of more than 12,000.
- 7.
Jim Waterson and Tom Phillips, ‘How the Conservatives are Using Local Adverts to Get around Election Spending Rules’, BuzzFeed, 5 May 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/how-the-conservatives-are-using-local-adverts-to-get-around?utm_term=.oanz2dXVNO#.sinQ2ERoPk.
- 8.
Tim Shipman, ‘Don’t Mention Corbyn, Aide Tells Labour Candidates’, Sunday Times, 21 May 2017. See also Howell, Game Changer, pp. 178–79.
- 9.
Robert Booth, ‘Conservatives Launch Online Offensive against Corbyn’, The Guardian, 16 May 2017.
- 10.
Caitlin Milazzo, Jesse Hammond and Joshua Townsley, ‘Leaflet Messaging in the 2017 and 2015 General Elections’, paper presented at the Elections, Public Opinion and Parties (EPOP) Conference, 2017.
- 11.
If so, no one told the team responsible for May’s campaign visits, since she carried on visiting Labour seats. ‘The two were out of sync’, one of the Conservative team admitted.
- 12.
Alia Middleton, ‘“For the Many, Not the Few”: Strategising the Campaign Trail at the 2017 UK General Election’, Parliamentary Affairs (forthcoming).
- 13.
See Alia Middleton, ‘Criss-crossing the Country: Did Corbyn and May’s Constituency Visits Impact on Their GE17 Performance?’, London School of Economics British Politics and Policy Blog, 9 August 2017, https://archive.is/MaCv7.
- 14.
Alex Nunns, The Candidate, OR Books, 2018, p. 343.
- 15.
For example, ibid., p. 322.
- 16.
Here we differ from the claims made in Middleton, ‘Criss-crossing the Country’ (see also footnote 18 in Appendix 1, below).
- 17.
See also Lewis Bassett, ‘How Corbyn’s Message Helped Labour Reclaim a Key Marginal Seat’, Labour List, 19 June 2017, https://archive.is/TiuVI.
- 18.
Tim Ross and Tom McTague, Betting the House. Biteback, 2017, p. 133.
- 19.
Tim Bale, Paul Webb and Monica Poletti, ‘Twice in a Row? UK Party Members’ Campaign Activities in the 2015 and 2017 General Elections Compared’, paper presented at the EPOP Conference, 2017. The exception is Facebook usage, largely because of the efforts of Labour and Lib Dem members.
- 20.
Tim Bale, Paul Webb and Monica Poletti, Grassroots: Who They are, What They Think and What They Do. Mile End Institute, 2018; and Tim Bale and Paul Webb, ‘We Didn’t see it Coming’ in Tonge, Leston-Bandeira and Wilks-Hegg (eds), Britain Votes 2017. p. 49.
- 21.
Milazzo et al., ‘Leaflet Messaging in the 2017 and 2015 General Elections’.
- 22.
The BES changed the question response slightly, replacing the (rather quaint) ‘text message’ option with a social media option. If anything, this should have had the effect of raising the overall contact levels, given how much money the parties invested in social media, but it does not appear to have done so.
- 23.
Justin Fisher, David Cutts, Edward Fieldhouse and Yohanna Sällberg, ‘The Impact of Constituency Campaigning on the 2017 General Election’, presentation at ‘Election Campaigning Laid Bare: New Research on the Nature and Impact of Election Campaigns’, PSA Event at the Institute for Government, October 2017.
- 24.
The legal position of this activity is discussed in Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2015. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p. 199.
- 25.
Though not all. Some of the London constituencies were looking good for Labour almost immediately.
- 26.
By eve of poll, ComRes had only a five-point Conservative lead among postal voters, as a result of a surge in postal voting by Labour-backers aged under 35.
- 27.
Quoted in Lucy Fisher, ‘Labour Set to Lose Seats Everywhere But London’, The Times, 7 June 2017.
- 28.
Mark Wallace, ‘Our CCHQ Election Audit: The Rusty Machine, Part Two. How and Why the Ground Campaign Failed’, ConservativeHome, 6 September 2017, https://www.conservativehome.com/majority_conservatism/2017/09/our-cchq-election-audit-the-rusty-machine-part-two-how-and-why-the-ground-campaign-failed.html.
- 29.
See the Electoral Commission’s Digital Campaining: Increasing Transparency for Voters (2018), which traces the rise of digital advertising as a proportion of total advertising spend, including a jump of almost 20 percentage points between 2015 and 2017. As one Lib Dem campaigner put it rather prosaically: ‘Stamps have got a lot more expensive in recent years.’
- 30.
Jim Waterson, ‘Corbyn’s Media Gamble: The Labour Leader Has Ditched Newspaper Journalists in the Campaign Trail’, BuzzFeed, 4 May 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/jeremy-corbyn-has-ditched-newspaper-journalists-on-the?utm_term=.annNW4XmE#.wbyyvzY4O.
- 31.
One other difference was that since 2015, Edmonds and Elder had set up a digital consultancy. For the 2017 campaign, Edmonds was seconded to CCHQ full time, whereas Elder split his time between CCHQ and the consultancy.
- 32.
Joe Wade, ‘How Labour Won the Social Media Battle’, The Times, 24 June 2017.
- 33.
See Cowley and Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2015, p. 266.
- 34.
Christopher Hope, ‘Revealed: Twitter Admits How it Helped Labour Win the Social Media General Election Battle’, Daily Telegraph, 28 December 2017. In general, however, digital staff of all parties are fairly dismissive of Twitter, which they see as a platform inhabited by journalists and commentators rather than swing voters.
- 35.
After the election, a member of the team said: ‘Hardly out of its cradle, and we made it sit its A levels.’
- 36.
There was also—just as importantly—a need to ensure that all spending was compliant with the law, and so built into Promote were procedures to record and limit spending to the permitted level.
- 37.
By the end of the campaign, about 60% of Labour MPs in the North East, for example, were using Promote to send out local targeted Facebook adverts.
- 38.
There is a good discussion of how Labour affiliated with ‘outriders’ in Howell, Game Changer, pp. 68–69.
- 39.
Katharine Dommett and Luke Temple, ‘The Rise of Facebook and Satellite Campaigns’ in Tonge, Leston-Bandeira and Wilks-Heeg (eds), Britain Votes 2017.
- 40.
Philip Maughan, ‘How Grime Music Fell in Love with Jeremy Corbyn’, New Statesman, 8 August 2017.
- 41.
Tom Phillips and Jim Waterson, ‘Not Even Right-Wingers are Sharing Positive Stories about Theresa May on Facebook’, BuzzFeed, 3 June 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/not-even-right-wingers-are-sharing-positive-stories-about?utm_term=.ccK7Xa5yAp#.swZwn6gqkX.
- 42.
See Thomas G. Clark, ‘How Many of Jeremy Corbyn’s Policies Do You Actually Disagree with?’, Another Angry Voice, 20 April 2017, http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com/2017/04/how-many-of-jeremy-corbyns-policies-do.html.
- 43.
Robert Booth and Alex Hern, ‘“Labour Win Social Media Election”, Digital Strategists Say’, The Guardian, 10 June 2017; and Nicholas Cecil, ‘How Jeremy Corbyn Beat Theresa May in the Social Media Election War’, Evening Standard, 14 June 2017.
- 44.
Ross and McTague, Betting the House, pp. 320–21.
- 45.
On the most popular topics, see Tom Phillips, ‘People on Facebook Didn’t Think This was the “Brexit Election”’, BuzzFeed, 8 June 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/social-barometer-final-week?utm_term=.lqjv2Z5Lr#.emw3QlaXG. See also Freddy Mayhew, ‘General Election: Only Five out of Top 100 Most-Shared Stories on Social Media were Pro-Tory’, Press Gazette, 12 June 2017.
- 46.
As claimed by Jimmy Leach, ‘Polling Asks Questions, Social Media Analysis is about Listening. That’s Why the Polls were Wrong’, The Times, 16 June 2017.
- 47.
This may be an artefact of the way in which the BES asks the question—first asking people if they’ve been contacted and only then how. It is possible that people who have seen, say, Facebook adverts do not initially see this as ‘contact’.
- 48.
The SNP were on 9.6% and the Liberal Democrats on 3.6%. See https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/899900238114291713.
- 49.
Both surveys were conducted online, which will have skewed the responses, ignoring the minority of people who now have no online presence at all.
- 50.
This paragraph draws on Wave 12 of the BES, conducted during the campaign.
- 51.
The figures for Twitter are lower: 6% had seen information from candidates or parties, 6% from those they knew personally and 9% from others.
- 52.
As they were not in 2015. See Jonathan Mellon and Christopher Prosser, ‘Twitter and Facebook are Not Representative of the General Population: Political Attitudes and Demographics of British Social Media Users’, Research & Politics, 4(3) (2017): 1–9.
- 53.
Conservative (and UKIP) supporters were slightly less likely than the supporters of the other parties to be users of social media (64% of Conservative supporters used Facebook, compared to 78% for Labour supporters, for example), but even controlling for usage of Facebook (or Twitter) produces an almost identical effect. Of those who used Facebook, for example, 8% of Conservative voters shared political content compared to 23% of Labour voters.
- 54.
Note that the data exclude the largest social network, Facebook.
- 55.
Darren Yaxley, ‘Brits Believe Traditional Media Mattered More in the 2017 General Election’, YouGov, 4 August 2017, https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/08/04/brits-believe-traditional-media-mattered-more-2017. See also Freddy Mayhew, ‘Survey Reveals the Extent to Which Newspapers and Social Media Influenced Voting Decisions at the 2017 General Election’, Press Gazette, 31 July 2017.
- 56.
See ‘What Could Have Been’ Jacobin, 2017; and Nunns, The Candidate, p. 340. Cotton criticised, among others, the campaign in Worsley & Eccles South (where Barbara Keeley defended a 6,000 majority, which she increased to 8,000) for not directing workers to nearby marginals. But in 2015, UKIP had polled over 7,500 votes in the constituency, and there was no UKIP candidate standing in 2017. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
- 57.
Tom Phillips, ‘This is What the Twitter Abuse of Politicians during the Election Really Looked Like’, BuzzFeed, 23 July 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/twitter-abuse-of-mps-during-the-election-doubled-after-the?utm_term=.ja9KDJl1V3#.oe8X3O5EZw.
- 58.
Jessica Elgot, ‘Diane Abbott More Abused Than Any Other MPs during Election’, The Guardian, 5 September 2017.
- 59.
See Electoral Commission, Standing for Office in 2017. Electoral Commission, 2017; and Sofia Delmar, Jennifer Hudson, Wolfgang Rudig and Rosie Campbell, ‘Inappropriate Behaviour: Experiences of 2017 Parliamentary Candidates: Evidence from the Representative Audit of Britain Study’, submitted to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, 19 September 2017.
- 60.
The other figures variously ranged from 62% (the SNP) to 10% (Green), although some of the sub-samples are based on very low numbers of respondents (just eight in the case of the SNP).
- 61.
HC Debs, 28 June 2017, c. 585.
- 62.
HC Debs, 12 July 2017, cc. 152WH–170WH. The topic was also discussed in the Commons on 14 September 2017, cc. 1041–1083.
- 63.
Committee on Standards in Public Life, Intimidation in Public Life: A Review by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, December 2017.
- 64.
See also the comments in the Conservatives’ post-election review (Eric Pickles’ General Election Review 2017), which noted that such ‘levels of intimidation and abuse have not been experienced before’ (p. 6).
- 65.
For example, one study of the 2005 Parliament, solely of MPs rather than candidates and in general rather than just at election time, found that 81% of respondents had experienced what it called ‘intrusive/aggressive behaviours’, including 53% who had been stalked or harassed. See David V. James, Seema Sukhwal, Frank R. Farnham, Julie Evans, Claire Barrie, Alice Taylor and Simon P. Wilson, ‘Harassment and Stalking of Members of the United Kingdom Parliament: Associations and Consequences’, Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, 27(3) (2016): 309–30.
- 66.
For a discussion of the trends in local campaigning, see Justin Fisher et al., ‘The Evolution of District-Level Campaigning in Britain: The Resilience of Traditional Campaigning?’, paper presented at the EPOP Conference 2016.
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Cowley, P., Kavanagh, D. (2018). Targeted (and Untargeted) Local Campaigning. In: The British General Election of 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95936-8_12
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