Dr Hannah Bunting
Co-director of The Elections Centre at the University of Exeter where she is a Lecturer in Quantitative British politics. She is also a Sky News elections analyst. Her work looks at the competitiveness of British elections, examining how the changing party system impacts both voters and the results of elections. She has also published work on political trust and gender in politics.
Email: h.willis@exeter.ac.uk
Joely Santa Cruz
Data Journalist at Sky News. She is part of the Data and Forensics team and tells data-driven stories by gathering, analysing and visualising data. Her journalism covers a wide range of topics but she has a particular interest in government and public services.
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 summer election of 2024 was bookended by two rainy days. Rishi Sunak, who had been Prime Minister for 18 months and leader of the Conservative party in government for 14 years, made the wet announcement outside Number 10 on the 22nd May. Six weeks later, the drizzle returned as his party suffered their greatest ever electoral defeat. The sky cleared just in time for Sir Keir Starmer to walk into Downing Street on his first day as Prime Minister, heading the new Labour government. The changing weather was a perfect allegory for the scale of change this election brought and what it meant for the two parties.
In between those two days was a mostly sunny campaign period. The two leaders whose parties exchanged power fought mirrored campaigns, with one striking similarity. Neither Sunak nor Starmer made campaign visits to crowds of people, signalling a more controlled and media conscious campaign style that learnt from previous missteps beyond their control. Nobody wanted a repeat of incidents that change the narrative of a campaign, and in particular its media coverage, such as leaving a mic on catching a phrase like ‘bigoted woman’ or eating a bacon sandwich and being caught in an unflattering photograph.
Until the 1990s, campaigns for government were fought in front of the masses, on top of soap boxes and with megaphones, but modern campaigns do not want that unpredictability. They did not want the distrust and contempt felt for politics to smear their campaign by hecklers or protesters. In the final televised BBC debate, shouts from protesters could be heard outside and it would have been a very different campaign if those voices had regularly stopped the leaders from delivering their messages. That delivery is done indirectly now, through the media, and not straight to individuals – they leave that to their local campaigners who don’t have a media crew following them. Of course, this avoidance of crowds doesn’t eliminate all gaffes, as the Conservatives found when Rishi Sunak visited the Titanic Quarter and again when he left D-Day commemorations early. Sir Keir Starmer did manage to avoid such blunders though.
Mr Sunak had the most to lose, defending the broad coalition of voters that won Boris Johnson 365 seats in 2019. His constituency visits demonstrated the recognition that many of them were vulnerable. He visited the most constituencies on the campaign trail compared to other leaders, and had to fight against three main challengers: Reform in high Brexit voting seats, the Liberal Democrats in the South West and South East, and Labour almost everywhere else. His campaign stops included seats that should have been extremely safe, such as Cornwall South East in the first week where the Conservatives had a 38.7% majority, and Amber Valley the week before polling day where his party had a 37% majority. Both were lost to Labour. Devon North, which he visited in week four of the campaign, had a 26.7% Tory majority but now has a Liberal Democrat MP. Sunak didn’t visit any of the seats that Reform ended up gaining from them. Campaigns are usually fought in predominantly marginal seats, but the trend of these deep defensive visits showed that the Conservatives were expecting the overwhelming defeat they ultimately suffered.
For Labour and the Liberal Democrats, their leaders’ campaign visits signalled the growing confidence that they would win. Whilst they stopped by seats where they needed big swings throughout – such as Davey visiting Chichester in week one where they overturned a 38.5% Tory majority on polling day, and Starmer’s very first stop in Gillingham & Rainham where his party toppled a 32.9% Conservative majority on election night – overall the two main challenger parties began in more marginal seats and ended in more ambitious targets. This included places they’ve never won before, such as Wimbledon for the Lib Dems and Hertford & Stortford for Labour.
The smaller parties also fought qualitatively different campaigns in their styles. Sir Ed Davey became known for his stunts, such as riding rollercoasters and bungee jumping, which featured in most of his campaign visits. He was happy to be seen with crowds of people or in busy places. Nigel Farage as leader of Reform actively sought out crowds, starting with 800 people in what’s now his constituency of Clacton, then attracting 1500 people in UKIP’s old headquarters town of Newton Abbot, and moving on to several thousand at a rally in Birmingham. He did have distrustful members of the public throw things at him, but this did not deter him in the same way it did main party leaders. The Green co-leaders, and both Scottish and Welsh leaders, were also not exclusively seen in controlled environments.
Ultimately the campaign visits informed us of two main insights. First, there is a difference between campaigns for government and campaigns for gaining vote share without seeking power: the main party leaders were controlled and indirect; the smaller party leaders communicated directly to the electorate. Second, they told us about the parties’ expectations for the results. A Conservative wipeout, and widespread opposition party success. They were correct.
