Dr Siim Trumm
Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on electoral politics, political communication, and questions of political representation and participation. He runs the OpenElections project with Prof Caitlin Milazzo.
Email: Siim.Trumm@nottingham.ac.uk
Prof Caitlin Milazzo
Professor of Politics, University of Nottingham.
Caitlin’s current research focuses on the nature of campaign messaging and the behaviour of political candidates and parties in British general elections. Alongside Dr Siim Trumm, she runs the citizen science project, OpenElections, which allows voters to track and analyse election communications.
Email: caitlin.milazzo@nottingham.ac.uk
UK Election 2024
Section 4: Parties and the campaign
34. A changed but over-staged Labour Party and the political marketing weaknesses behind Starmer’s win (Prof Jennifer Lees-Marshment)
35. To leaflet or not to leaflet? The question of election leafleting in Sunderland Central (Prof Angela Smith, Dr Mike Pearce)
36. Beyond ‘my dad was a toolmaker’: what it’s really like to be working class in parliament (Dr Vladimir Bortun)
37. The unforced errors of foolish men: gender, race and the calculus of harm (Prof Karen Ross)
38. Election 2024 and rise of Reform UK: the beginning of the end of the Conservatives? (Dr Anthony Ridge-Newman)
39. The Weakening of the Blue Wall (Prof Pete Dorey)
40. The Conservative party, 1832-2024: an obituary (Dr Mark Garnett)
41. Bouncing back: the Liberal Democrat campaign (Prof Peter Sloman)
42. The Greens: riding two horses (Prof Neil Carter, Dr Mitya Pearson)
43. Party organisations and the campaign (Dr Danny Rye)
44. Local campaign messaging at the 2024 General Election (Dr Siim Trumm, Prof Caitlin Milazzo)
45. The value of getting personal: reflecting upon the role of personal branding in the General Election (Dr Jenny Lloyd)
46. Which constituencies were visited by each party leader and what this told us about their campaigns (Dr Hannah Bunting, Joely Santa Cruz)
47. The culture wars and the 2024 General Election campaign (Prof John Steel)
48. “Rishi’s D-Day Disaster”: authority, leadership and British military commemoration (Dr Natalie Jester)
49. Party election broadcasts: the quest for authenticity (Dr Vincent Campbell)
The 2024 General Election redrew the map of British politics. The Labour Party won a landslide, turning vast parts of the electoral map from blue to red. Here, we use data from the OpenElections Project to explore the messaging used in local campaigns that delivered this result. Our preliminary analysis of more than 1,200 election leaflets distributed in 295 constituencies across England, Scotland, and Wales includes leaflets from all the mainstream parties. Leaflets provide a great source of heterogeneity in campaigns across constituencies, both in form – some leaflets are postcards, while others are essentially short magazines – and substance, and remain the most common way that voters engage with parties and their candidates during election campaigns. As a result, they offer a unique window into the kinds of local campaign messages that voters received in the run-up to the 2024 General Election.
As a part of our preliminary analysis, we looked at whether the following issue areas featured in a leaflet: the economy, education, the environment, Europe/Brexit, governance, health, immigration, and social welfare. Across all leaflets, health (81 %), the economy (80 %), and the environment (54 %) were the most common issues (Table 1). However, these figures disguise some interesting variation in the focus of the campaigns across parties. For example, Reform Party and Scottish National Party leaflets were much more likely to talk about Europe/Brexit – 72 % for both – than those of the other parties, while almost all Reform Party leaflets also discussed immigration (97 %), and most Scottish National Party leaflets talked about governance (78 %), in stark contrast to those of the other parties. It is also interesting that social welfare featured more heavily in Scottish National Party leaflets (61 %) and Conservative Party leaflets (42 %) than it did for the other parties.
Election leaflets do not only talk about the positions of the candidate and their party. In addition, they frequently feature messages about one’s local or national opponent(s). Political scientists generally define these as ‘negative’ messages. The OpenElections Project identifies a leaflet as containing negative messaging if it includes at least one reference to an opposing party, leader, or candidate. Previous research suggests that criticising one’s opponent is quite common in Britain, and 2024 was no exception. Across all leaflets, 68 % of them included at least one negative message. While the level of negativity is lower than in previous general elections, we see again that there is considerable variation across parties. Interestingly, leaflets from Reform Party were, by far, the least likely to discuss opponents, while Liberal Democrats leaflets were most likely to use negative messaging (Figure 1).
Finally, we explore how common it is for campaign communications to discuss the tactical situation. These are messages that draw voters’ attention to the electoral context – e.g., ‘Labour can’t win here’. They are similar to negative messages in that they mention opposing parties by name and are intended to undermine an opponent’s position, but they differ in that they draw voters’ attention to weaknesses in their opponent’s support (or traditional vote share) to dissuade voters from wasting their ballot on a party that has no chance of winning locally, rather than focusing on the weaknesses of the opponent themselves. There has been much talk recently about the perceived rise in tactical voting. This is supported by our evidence (Figure 2). Across all leaflets, 38 % of them included a tactical message, which is significantly higher than in the last four general elections that the OpenElections Project covers. This is likely due to a) the growing prominence of tactical voting websites like www.tacticalvote.co.uk, which make voting assessments easier, b) the increased prominence of MRP (Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification) modelling by major polling firms such as YouGov and Survation, which provide constituency-level estimates of party support, and c) the collapse of Conservative Party support in many constituencies. With respect to the latter, significant losses in recent local elections, for example, frequently acted as the basis for tactical messages about the viable alternatives in previously-held Conservative seats.
Local campaigns continue to play an important role in British general election campaigns and data from the OpenElections Project provides an interesting insight into what parties talk about locally, as well as how they do so.
