Just Don’t Care - UK voters and #GE24
Signify’s ShareScore technology tells you what people really care about. In this insight study, we have looked at whether voters care about the UK General Election (Spoiler: Not really), and dive deeper into which parties and leaders drove the highest levels of public interest.
Ahead of voting on 4th July 2024, Signify’s data featured on the Election broadcast for ITV’s flagship Political programme - Peston (see the clip below). The graphic shown on screen by Anushka Asthana reveals that despite all the hype around the election in the six week campaign, the UK public are much more interested in sport (of course!), culture, the Royal Family and global news. Politics is a lowly fifth despite a month of constant campaigning and headlines.
ITV Peston - 3rd July 2024
The top 5 list was created by looking at the 1,000 most-shared stories in the UK across major news titles (see detailed graphic below) and categorising those stories. There’s also bad news within this sample for the Conservative Party: by far the biggest stories within the past month relate to the rise of the Reform Party, along with the political betting scandal (mainly a Conservative problem) which has really captured the imagination of tabloid editors and readers.
Fig. 1 Overall topics of public interest in month prior to the election
The beauty of machine learning is that we can look deeper and take far bigger samples than would have been considered possible even a few years ago. This analysis, run in only a few hours, is based on thousands of articles, blogs and videos with millions of social media engagements – something that would have taken months or even years for a team of researchers to document in the past. Machine learning enables our analysts to categorise, cluster and spot trend and insights in a matter of hours – and just as importantly, we don’t impose any questions or filters. We are looking at what people are really interested in without prompting them. In this case we pulled literally everything that the UK public cared about in the past 28 days.
Looking deeper into the data, we used a machine learning process called entity extraction to pull every single mention of the parties and their leaders from this coverage, to work out who drove the most public engagement (see charts below). Reform garnered nearly as much public reaction as the Conservatives.
Fig. 2 Which parties drove the most engagement in month prior to the election
Machines cannot completely replace analysts and it is important to understand the context of all this coverage and engagement. For instance, most coverage of Reform was neutral or hostile, whilst the betting and PPE procurement scandals accounted for more than half of public engagement with the Conservative Party in the month leading up to the election.
Fig. 3 Breakdown of Conservative Party Coverage in the lead up to the 2024 Election
Compounding the bad news for Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, as a party leader he was knocked into second place by Keir Starmer in terms of public attention and reaction. (See Figure 4 below) The Labour leader and party suffered plenty of controversy relating to trans rights, Dianne Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, but overall his name was associated with campaign news and policy commitments. Coverage and engagement can be either positive or negative, but an incumbent Prime Minister would usually eclipse an opposition leader comfortably, as Boris Johnson achieved in the 2019 Election. (See Figure 5)
Fig. 4 Leaders who drove the most engagement in month prior to the election
Fig. 5 Leader coverage and engagement at last election
At Signify, we are obsessed with what people are thinking about, so we have a natural interest in Politics - but we hear it said time and again that the wider public pays a lot less attention. Turnout in the 2024 General Election is expected to be low, and Labour to win comfortably. What our data confirms is that the rest of the UK public have a much more well-adjusted set of priorities – and that while most of the parties have done a good job in framing what coverage and attention was available, the Conservatives have entered polling day with a month of negative coverage, defined primarily by scandal.
On this basis, our ShareScore data supports the general polling predictions for the Election with an upset unlikely, and that the most excited group of supporters heading into the election are those who support Reform. The over-riding lesson for the traditional two big parties, however, is that a lack of interest in politics is something they will need to pay attention to going forwards, otherwise, memberships will continue to dwindle, alongside their future support.
Polling Station Header Image via Creative Commons Image License
Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/secretlondon/3598534263/in/photostream/