Deborah Mattinson Column: How to get noticed when voters aren’t listening

I know exactly how stressed the team who have been preparing for conference feels right now. I’ve been there. Months of work and what you might politely call ‘internal debate’ on the theme, key speeches, announcements, votes. And yet, while the Westminster bubble is all ears, voters notice so much less than you hope, even if something happens that catapults your story onto the front pages (thank you glitter man in 2023). And it’s getting harder.

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I was shocked, back in 2007, when David Cameron was leader of the opposition, and a focus group participant didn’t recognise him even when shown a photograph. A few weeks ago, in a group of similar voters no one – literally no one – knew who Kemi Badenoch was. Now, you might say that’s proof of how ineffectual she is. But, in her defence, I think something else is going on here – something that threatens all politicians, not just Badenoch.

Quite simply, voters are switching off. 24% say they rarely or never follow political news, while a further 29% follow ‘only occasionally’. Viewing figures for political shows have plummeted – Newsnight alone almost halved its audience between 2015 and 2020. If the press mattered beyond Westminster, Labour probably couldn’t have won last year…but readership of national newspapers has nosedived too, falling by 2/3 over the past two decades. Hardly surprising then, that the focus group warm up question ‘tell me what you’ve noticed in the news lately’ rarely produces a political story.

This has consequences. Turnout in the ’24 election dipped under 60%, lowest since 2001. Back then, many safe Labour seats saw a 20+% drop in turnout. Some MPs shrugged it off, but Margaret Hodge in Barking was affronted by what had happened and got in touch. Together, we conducted polling and focus groups to understand the shift and our resulting report, entitled ‘anger not apathy’ told the story of a disaffected electorate actively rejecting rather than drifting away from politics.

It’s not a new story. Today’s remedy builds on three key lessons from Hodge’s hugely successful fightback: empathy, clarity and local focus. A plan built on these saw her thrashing the BNP nine years later in 2010 down to 14.6% of the vote (Hodge won 54.3%) 

Empathy

Of course, voters want politicians who are on their side, give them a hearing, represent their views and deliver on their behalf, as Hodge did so diligently in Barking. 

Working class voters struggled to imagine how a knighted lawyer from North London could see the world through their eyes until they learned that he came from a background they could relate to. The Westminster bubble smirked at the ‘son of a toolmaker’ but many voters reassessed Starmer, seeing him as a successful, self-made man committed to giving others the opportunities he had had. Worryingly, a recent poll suggested that now fewer than 1 in 5 know this backstory, once so effective in building Starmer’s favourability.

That said, it isn’t essential to be like your voters to show empathy. Trump was clearly very different from his target voters but so vividly channelled their anger, that the differences between voters’ lives and his became, oddly, a plus point “he doesn’t have to do this – he does it because he cares’, one voter in Michigan told me.

Clarity

To state the obvious, voters need to know what they’re voting for. Hodge was helped by the clarity of new Labour’s pitch post 2001, arguably at its most potent, in its second term of government. Her task was to translate this into standing up for Barking which she did with panache.  

Clarity of message relies on having an overarching vision that reflects your values, showcasing the dividing lines between you and your opponents. It needs to address people’s concerns and offer hope. Policy must illustrate and emphasise. But throwing out policy untethered to a vision risks confusion. Back in the day, we used to talk about ‘symbolic policies’ – policies that worked to bring the vision to life. Founding the NHS is arguably the most iconic example, defining Labour ever since. 

But even the best policy needs great comms. Given how little voters notice you can’t say something once and expect it to land. Here, we need the painstaking craft of storytelling, repeating the central message in different ways again and again. 

It also helps to avoid ‘political speak’ which voters despise. Sticky language is distinctive. When I worked for Gordon Brown, he liked to characterise his economic positioning as ‘prudence with a purpose’. It said what he wanted but, frankly, sounded a bit odd. And that’s precisely why voters noticed it, thought about it, and remembered it.

Local

In a recent project for the US Think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute we asked voters to keep a diary and record examples of what is going wrong in Britain nowadays. Every single example they offered was hyper local. People shared images of boarded up shops, litter, potholes, run down housing, and vagrancy in their local communities. This was the lens through which they saw Britain’s problems.

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That’s why Bidenomics, although celebrated by economists, failed electorally. While prices were rocketing the impact of the much-vaunted spending was simply never felt in local communities, and therefore, in voters’ minds, it never worked. 

Conversely, focus groups conducted after the re-election of the Australian Labour party showed how victory derived from a successful translation of national policy into local delivery. Investing in Medicare was always popular, but new neighbourhood emergency centres made what might have been abstract and therefore forgettable, real for voters. 

Labour’s new ‘Pride in Britain’ regional regeneration funds have the potential to pack a similar punch, with the added benefit of being run by local neighbourhood boards who will decide how the funds are to be spent, rather than dictat from on high. The government’s challenge will be ‘owning the success’ – which means that this too needs to be manifestly part of a joined up vision.

Finally – and this might sound strange coming from someone who has spent decades  translating voter insight into tight, disciplined strategy – rocking the boat a bit can get you noticed.

As our recent PPI report shows clearly, conviction matters at least as much as delivery – ‘yes we care’ turbocharges ‘yes we can’ and one way to get noticed is to say what you really think, make an argument and let voters judge. 

As trust has declined, voters crave authenticity.  Forthright politicians who speak out, make their case, and live with the consequences. That may mean highlighting unpopular facts. It may mean taking the fight to your detractors as Hodge did in 2010: the ‘battling granny’ fighting for the whole community against those trying to divide it.

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Candour can be the most effective tool for cut through and who knows, it could just herald a new, grown up era of politics that stops infantilising voters, who in turn might, for once, look again as politicians s

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