The following data is from MORI’s aggregate polling 6 April – 6 May and shows how levels of Liberal Democrat support and turnout varied across different age groups:
This problem isn’t new to the 2010 general election, though the pattern was less neat in 2005. It does raise an interesting question for the party’s get out the vote efforts though, both in terms of technology and targeting.
Some places have made very successful use of technology such as text messaging to remind people to vote, but generally there is very patchy take-up of these sorts of approaches which are likely to be particularly effective with younger voters (more ready to sign up to receive text messages from others, harder to find in when knocking on doors etc.).
Similarly, the use of actual or estimated age data to help identify and then concentrate on younger voters to remind them to vote or to get them sign up to postal votes is more widespread but far from universal.
Learning about and trying out both approaches need not wait until there is an election immediately in the offing, so if your local branch or local party wasn’t already doing both of these to the full, why not make use of the summer months to start a few experiments?
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17 Comments
Good article, it would be nice if we could see a few more articles on here detailing precisely how to do such things. At my university the best we could manage was knocking on everyone’s doors on election day and getting them out to vote.
It would be interesting to see some targeted polling to find out what reasons people give.
Is the % voted Liberal Democrat the percentage of people who voted or percentage of the electorate? I guess it is the former, in which case the graph might not look quite so stark.
It is a nice article. At my view it is not possible that we go door to door on Election Day and getting them out to vote.
Another way to look at these figures is that we have a lot of potential for growth. All the research shows that most voters form their allegiancies at an early age, often simply inheriting the opinions of their family or background.
Someone who is 80 now may have made their political choice when the Liberals were a joke with 5 MPs & 50 odd councillors, its been a long, uphill struggle against the drag of the past.
George, there are lots of training sessions at Federal Conferences on such things (and IIRC you don’t even need to be a member of conference to attend them, just a party member). There’s also some training at regional conferences if it’s organised properly.
I suspect that this may be down to elections where the public mood swings towards a strong change in government, which is bound to lead to increased turnout and more polarisation towards the two major parties.
Also, doesn’t this mainly show that older people are more likely to vote Labour or Conservative, and that – hardly surprising – younger voters couldn’t be bothered turning up to vote?
In Burnley, some of our campaigners believe a significant part of the problem is younger people:
a) not knowing how to register to vote;
b) not knowing whether they are entitled to vote;
c) not knowing how to vote;
d) not knowing where to vote;
e) feeling intimidated by the idea of voting;
and other related conditions. The suggestion has been made that, this year, this wasw more significant than not being bothered to vote. Accordingly we are setting up a Council scrutiny review to explore the problem in detail with officer support.
Darren
Is this equally a failure of campaign literature and liberal ideas being marketed adequately to older voters? Is the harder task getting young liberals to vote or persuading older people, who can reliably be trusted to go to the polling station, that liberal policy is for them? From the look of this graph, one liberal pensioner is worth two liberal students at the polling station.
Anyone got any good jam/cake recipes?
I’d back up Darren’s anecdata here – Manchester University registered all its students to vote, and the Students’ Union did a good job of informing them what the parties’ national positions on main issues were, but most of them didn’t know the difference between the local and general election or why they weren’t voting for Nick Clegg directly.
Great article in terms of focussing minds for future elections.
We had a poor result here in that we went from 2 cllrs to 1!
Had our first exec after the election and got the stats, in % terms we had increased our share of the vote in most wards, including some surprises… One that stood out was my own ward… We didn’t go door to door very much as it wasn’t a target. We’re not a very rich party… So we took the centrally supplied student newspaper ‘the radical’ and we handed them out outside various tube stations from 4-7 in the evening on about 4-5 occasions. We caught students coming back from college and uni as well as commuters who may well have children at college and we had our youngest members and sometimes our ppc there. Not only did we capture a larger share of the vote but we also enthused lots of young people to join to the point where we now have a youth network established.
The key now is to keep them engaged, we have improved our twitter and facebook presence and we have a bbq and a pizza and politics evening planned in July and Aug.
PS – one of the reasons we weren’t campaigning that hard here was because we made a strategic decision to help our two neighbours, brent and watford, who had a greater chance of winning seats in this election. We got Sarah Teather, but unfortunately Sal Brinton sadly lost by about 1000 votes. When you are doing this sort of thing you have to start thinking creatively about how you reach people in your own area, which is where the idea of having 2-3 people outside tube stations at commuter time came from.
In South Leicestershire where we started a poor third, we made extensive use of Facebook and with an expenditure of just over £1000 for teh whole campaign, we took second place from Labour by 84 votes. we were all very pleased. As with everyone else, we not have to work hard to keep the people who volunteered to help and get them more involved.
Today, someone said to me that I should not let the fact that there are LibDems in government go to my head, but its already too late – I have.
@Dave Pollard – and rightly so!
A lot of our campaign literature does seem to be designed on the basis that the people who are getting it know how to vote and what they are voting for. So we end up competing for the pool of regular voter rather than bringing in new ones. More material which is simply informative rather than hectoring “Vote for us, the others are rubbish” might work better than we suppose.
The points Darren Reynolds makes are good ones – we take it for granted people know how to get to the polling station and what to do once they are there, for those of us who have been voting all our lives this is so trivial we hardly think about it. It is surprising, however, how much young people who may be full of bravado over some things are intimidated by what seems to those older as fairly trivial. It’s part of growing up and the fear of losing face.
Another point is that people who are young but old enough to have left home and moved away are likely not to feel a particular attachment to some place where they may be living for just a short period. If you’ve just moved on and will probably move out next year, you aren’t going to be bothered about local council issues, and you may feel that who is MP for that constituency isn’t really something you should interfere with either.
If young people aren’t sure where the polling station is just make sure the postcodes are on all of our literature. After that Google Maps takes over. If we can print a different version of the leaflet for each polling district (even if the only difference is the address of the polling station) that’s even better.
When I was involved in local elections in Woking we always used to make sure we concentrated in getting older voters out in the afternoon. Perhaps we also need to determine the best time to concentrate on getting younger voters out to vote.