Issues, Issues, Issues

Brexit outweighed all other issues in #GE19 and Boris Johnson’s focus on “Getting Brexit Done” latched onto this to drive the Tories to their largest electoral majority since 1987. Looking at the relationship between the issues and party leaders provides some interesting insights into how this played out.

Signify use machine learning to provide data-driven insights into what audiences care about. Using our proprietary technology, we looked at social media data across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit, to identify the most shared news coverage relating specifically to party leaders over 6 weeks (6th Oct – 25th Nov 2019). The results were clear:

As expected, Brexit was by far the most significant issue during the campaign, with more than double the social shares vs other issues in the 6 weeks leading up to 25th November. Whether positive or negative, it was Johnson’s personal association to this issue, in comparison to the lack of awareness with his opponents, that led as much as anything else to the resounding Conservative victory. In contrast, Brexit didn’t even register in Jeremy Corbyn’s top three issues (something Labour HQ may have intended given the party’s less decisive stance on the issue). 

In the final week of the campaign we saw one significant change as the NHS jumped from 5th position to a close second in our table of the most shared stories connected to party leaders.

This dramatic shift was triggered by the photo of Jack Williment-Barr, a boy with suspected pneumonia who slept on a pile of coats on the floor of a Leeds hospital due to the lack of beds. The resulting interview with Boris Johnson, where the PM refused to look at the photo, pocketing the interviewer’s phone, provided Labour with an opportunity to capitalise by focusing on the NHS. But even at this late stage in the campaign, Brexit remained the core issue – dominated by Boris Johnson. 

In 2017 during Theresa May’s snap election, Signify ran a similar exercise studying 5 million posts on social media, looking at the issues that resonated with UK voters in advance of the final poll. In that instance, we identified Social Care as a defining issue for the electorate, which turned out to be the key issue for many campaigners on the doorstep.

In the 2018 US mid-term elections, we achieved similar success in identifying the most important issues in the Arizona Senate race where the Democrat held a more consistent position on healthcare. Our data found that healthcare was twice as important to voters as immigration and national security (the topics used to attack her by her opponent). Against the odds, but in line with voter concerns, the Democratic candidate won.

Defining the issues that matter, and tailoring messaging to respond to these is the most effective way to run a campaign – saving money by creating ads that resonate and activate your audience – whether the desired action is for the audience to vote for your campaign, buy your product or identify with your brand. Our study on the issues in and around the 2019 UK Election campaign provides further proof points for this.

If you would like to learn more about Signify’s services, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.