You’ve met the man from Mondeo and the woman from Worcester, now you meet the key voter hoping Labor will win them the next election: a middle-aged mortgage man.
Party members say they are being ruthless in targeting exactly the kind of voters they believe will return them to power, reaching out to people who once lost faith with Labor but have seen personally affected by the rise in interest rates caused by Liz Truss. mini budget”.
Just as Labor won in 1997 by targeting upwardly mobile Mondeo drivers and the Conservatives in 2010 by targeting working-class women in Worcester, Starmer’s team believe the mortgaged man is the key to success in the next election, probably in 2024.
Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester, describes this archetypal voter as a man in his 50s, without a university degree but with a decent job in the private sector and, above all, a home owner with a mortgage. That person almost certainly voted for Leave, Ford added, explaining Labour’s insistence that it will not bring the UK back into the single market.
Ford said: “In 2019, Labor desperately wanted Scunthorpe voters to hear a different message to Remain voters in south London, but that strategy didn’t work.
“What they need to do this time is find an average voter who will help them take back the seats they won next time and come after them. That’s a middle-aged mortgage man.”
A Labor strategist in the leader’s office told the Guardian: “For a long time every time we spoke to the public we were trying to speak to four, five different groups of people.
“Going into the next election, we have to have this person in our minds whenever we make media appearances or commercials. That’s how we’ll win.”
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A Guardian analysis of British Election Study data shows that after years of steadily gaining ground with a middle-aged mortgage man, Labor fell five points with these voters in 2019, while the Conservatives gained almost one percentage point. This proved crucial in the North and Midlands, where the party lost several seats and where Guardian analysis shows such voters are more common.
In May of this year, the Conservatives were down 22 points among these voters. But Labor was also down by just over a point, with 15% saying they simply don’t know how they will vote next time.
Appealing to these voters means showing no sign of wanting to renegotiate the Brexit deal with the EU, party members say, hence Starmer’s unwillingness to even accept that returning to the single market would push the growth
Ian Lavery, MP for the North East seat of Wansbeck, said: “Many Brexit voters who supported Labor at the last election felt that our position on Europe basically told them that we thought they were wrong. We must regain trust with exactly those people.”
But winning over a middle-aged mortgage man means more than not giving way to Brexit, pollsters say. It also means keeping the election campaign focused on economic issues and capitalizing on the sense of financial insecurity exacerbated by this year’s mini-budget and the subsequent rise in interest rates.
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Labor strategists say they plan to reach these voters largely through local television and radio. But the party has also revamped its digital team under the aegis of digital director Tom Lillywhite, and is planning a series of digital ads to appeal specifically to this group.
Lillywhite is recruiting an army of digital operatives who are being asked to find local Labor advocates who might be better placed to win back the trust of people like the middle-aged mortgage man than the party’s own MPs.
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“We need ordinary people to be our message bearers, people who can say, ‘I used to vote Tory, but now I’m voting Labour’,” said a party source. “This will give others permission to cross as well.”
But as party leaders plot their way back with a middle-aged mortgage man, others worry he is reducing Labour’s appeal.
“It’s fine to say that middle-aged men are our priority,” said a senior MP. “But where is our offer to young voters, to voters of color, to disabled voters? Here we risk losing the voters we worked so hard for in the last election.”