Those lucky target voters

The campaign

Apr 7th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Which battle will matter most in the general election campaign?

UNLIKE the last two general election campaigns, this one could actually affect the result. Labour went into the 1997 and 2001 elections so far ahead that only the degree of Conservative humiliation was in question. For the election on May 5th, that's not true: Labour's lead is just a few points. The oddities of the electoral system mean this should still bring a solid overall majority, but the Tories' chances of recovery are now great enough for them to be taken seriously.

Labour's small lead and the likely low turnout give the parties two clear tasks. The first is to reach waverers in the 100-odd seats that have a realistic chance of changing hands. The second is to persuade lukewarm supporters to get out and vote. That is particularly important for Labour, which has greater underlying support, but more disillusioned voters. To win those battles, the parties are fighting on two fronts: national and local—the air war and the ground war respectively.

Political parties are not allowed to buy advertisements in the broadcast media, so the air war chiefly involves politicians taking swipes at each other on national television. They can pull tricks, such as refusing to be interviewed with an opponent, or answering every question with a monologue on the campaign theme of the day. But the rewards are limited. The wavering, disillusioned or apathetic voters whom the parties most need to reach are those least likely to be persuaded by set-piece political blather on telly. An added problem for Labour is that their success in getting media coverage in the past eight years makes audiences even less receptive.

One way round this is to get party heavyweights on to normally apolitical programmes such as daytime chat-shows. Tony Blair recently gave a television interview to two ten-year-old boys. After asking him silly questions such as why he didn't just print more money to give to poor people, they thanked him for his time with gifts that included patriotic-themed panties for Mrs Blair. That may strike the political classes as cheesy, but party managers think it reawakens interest among disengaged voters.

A second tactic is to take questions from audiences of “real people”, rather than from professional interviewers. Mr Blair was recently berated on live television by a woman from Cardiff who had resorted to pulling out her teeth herself because she couldn't find a publicly funded dentist. Such encounters might seem damaging to the point of masochism, but strategists reckon they make Mr Blair look in touch with the public, dispelling the notion that he is preoccupied by foreign affairs. And the public can, occasionally, be nice. One minister describes a live audience he faced recently as “surprisingly deferential”.

But the air war is mostly about denying opponents any advantage, rather than making real gains. Many viewers are simply not interested. After the 2001 election, 54% of the voters who took part in the British Election Study (BES), an academic study, said they had made up their minds about who to vote for “a long time ago”. Though a quarter of voters did admit to being swayed by the official campaign, even they may be fewer this time. The run-up to the election started in the middle of last year, when government departments started publishing their five-year plans—in effect a manifesto preview. So any voters who don't already know that there is an election on, or have no idea about how they will vote, probably belong to the 40% of the electorate expected to stay at home.

All the more reason, then, to fight the ground war hard: this is where the parties can reach the voters they need most. Both Labour and the Conservatives have been working to identify voters and locations that they can most usefully target. Parties are restricted by law to spending only 40p ($0.75) per voter in each constituency (plus, for each candidate, another £7,150 and a further few pence per voter). So wasting mailshots and phone calls on no-hopers has to be avoided. And as there now are fewer local activists, they must not waste time knocking on the wrong doors.

In 2001, Labour was much more effective at targeting its efforts than the Conservatives. On polling day, 18% of the voters that the Conservatives reminded to vote were in fact Labour supporters, according to the BES. Labour made that mistake only 7% of the time. Overall, Conservative tactics in the ground war have been “at least one election behind Labour”, according to Justin Fisher of Brunel University.

This time, the Tories hope to narrow the gap with a mixture of high and low technology. The Voter Vault software acquired from the Republicans in America places every constituent on the electoral register somewhere on a 3x3 grid, according to whether they support the Conservatives, other parties, or are undecided, and whether they are definitely, possibly or definitely not going to vote. Candidates are focusing their campaigns on V-sixes (Tories, but reluctant voters), V-eights (undecideds, who will definitely vote) and V-fives (undecideds, who may vote), while spending little time on the rest. The party reckons this is 70% accurate.

Meanwhile, candidates in target seats have been encouraged to risk tendonitis by hand-addressing letters with messages for thousands of key voters, in the hope that the personal touch makes them less likely to be tossed straight in the bin.

Labour too has some modern technology to exploit. A new call centre in Newcastle has made over 2m calls in the past year to identify the concerns of individual Labour supporters and undecided voters, who can then be contacted with tailored messages. The party is sending out several thousand DVDs in key seats. In Yorkshire, for example, some lucky voters in Shipley can look forward to an evening watching “Proud of Shipley”, a stirring tale featuring their MP and the Labour government's local largesse.

The Liberal Democrats' ground-war campaigns in winnable constituencies have in the past been more effective than those of other parties. But their footsoldiers may not be numerous enough to exploit that advantage more widely.

Before 1992, all party headquarters kept intervention in local campaigns to a minimum. Their control has increased in each of the last three elections. But this is the first time that a centrally directed ground war looks more important than the air war. The parties and their prospective MPs will be hoping the generals get it right.

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