Engaging the disengaged
Voter turnout is down, and news avoidance is up - are we entering an age of perennial disengagement?
The UK votes in a brand new Government, and the England men’s football team breezes through a penalty shootout with ice-cold zen, and on to a first final on foreign soil. It's a time of unbridled celebration and optimism (except if you’re Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, and/or couldn’t care less about football).
But both these moments of celebration were accompanied not by a narrative of unconstrained joy but one of “well, yeah, but…”.
England have made it to a second successful Euros final, and three semi-finals in four major tournaments under Gareth Southgate, having managed only two semis in the 30-odd years before that. But (before the Netherlands game), the team’s performances significantly underwhelmed the viewing public; there was an embarrassment of creative, attacking riches but little cohesion. There was not the same vibe around this team as there was in 2018 or 2021.
It’s a very British thing to do, comparing current exploits to the past, particularly in the summer. Great modern summers are always compared unfavourably to their counterparts. “Oh, this is nothing compared to the summer of 2003…”
And so it goes with the incoming Labour government - Starmer’s new administration has significant parallels to Blair’s 1997 winners. A substantial majority, a step-change after many years of Conservative rule, and a fresh new approach replacing the chaos of the past couple of years. But the waves of positivity that characterise that time (perhaps inaccurately) are nowhere to be seen in 2024. As the New York Times said over the weekend, “As Britain Votes, Change Is in the Air. Optimism, Not So Much”.
But as my colleague and Chair Chris Salt put it to us over the weekend, no evidence or research supports this assertion. Vibes don’t come from data; vibes are just vibes. And clearly, this is not 1997. We have myriad socioeconomic and geopolitical factors that continue to cast a pall over the country. The overall vibe is different, so comparing this Labour victory with any from the past is pointless.
Just as England’s progress through Euro 2024 was earlier met with a collective “meh”, so it feels with the election result. One data point that does support this vibe is voter turnout. Based on a survey reported by PA, voter turnout this year was 59.9%, the lowest turnout since 2001. It decreased sharply from 2019, when 67.3% of the country voted.
Of course, there are many reasons why someone might not vote. Our first-past-the-post system means that if you live in a safe seat for one of the parties, it feels entirely pointless to go along and put your cross in the box. I used to live in the Epsom & Ewell constituency, previously a Tory mainstay. Voting there felt particularly performative.
And this whole election cycle has felt a little like one of England’s group stage performances - flat, listless, lacking any real moments of drama. Right from the moment Rishi called the election, it felt like an exercise in futility for the Conservatives. But the political equivalents of putting Trent in midfield or not picking more than one left back (leaving the D-Day celebrations early and the Sky TV quote) removed any sense of contest from the picture.
If you know the result, why would you stay until the end? You’d be leaving early to beat the crowds, not bothering to interrupt your routine with a trip to the polling station. Indeed, that’s another parallel with the past - turnout in 1997 saw a drop from the nearly 80% of the population that turned out in 1992. There was no contest then, either.
It’s easy to dismiss 2024’s low voter turnout as a one-off, an aberration born of our strange times. But viewed alongside other available research, there could be signs of a more significant long-term trend.
Voter turnout globally is estimated to have dropped by 10 percentage points since the 1960s. While there were increases throughout the 00s and 10s in the UK, we’ve never returned to the 70%+ numbers of the 80s and 90s.
Much was made of the parties’ use of social media in 2024, with plenty of memes and short-form reaction videos getting the country talking. But young people (18-34) - the primary target audience for these posts - are statistically the least likely to vote (based on 2019 data). When we see the total figures, it will be fascinating to analyse whether the memes made any difference to that demographic. Based on data reported by The Independent, it’s unlikely. Their survey found that political apathy is “particularly high among young voters,” with a sense that the issues they care about “have not been addressed by the major parties.”
There’s also the interplay between the news and election cycles. A General Election is a big deal with mainstream media publications, with endless live blogs and feature pieces aimed at capturing attention. However, according to the latest Reuters Institute Digital News Report, elections don’t increase people’s interest in the news (the United States is an exception to this trend).
In the UK, the Reuters Institute team reported that interest in news in the United Kingdom “has almost halved since 2015…mirrored by a similar decline in interest in politics.” In addition to this decline in interest in news and politics, we see a continued uptick in news avoidance, with 39% of people globally saying they “selectively avoid the news.” In the UK, only 38% of people say they’re “extremely or very interested” in the news - down almost half from the 70% who said the same thing in 2015.
Much of this news avoidance stems from feelings of being “worn out” by the sheer amount of news happening at any one time. There is a sense that the coverage of wars, disasters, and politics “squeezes out” other, more pertinent news stories that are more relevant to people’s lives. 38% of people in the UK report feeling this way about news - a neat correlation with the 40% of the UK electorate that didn’t vote on July 4th.
There’s little demonstrable causation at play here. However, similar factors are at play between how people engage with politics and how they engage with news. Elections are big business for news organisations, a six-week burst where politics is happening all the time, to quote my old colleague Dave Ahluwalia. Wall-to-wall politics is great for the politically engaged—but it is yet another reason for the disengaged to disengage further.
As statisticians and researchers parse the final data, and the detailed election post-mortems appear, there will be further opportunities to unpack why voter turnout was so low in 2024, to get into the granular details of demographics, locations, and attitudes. However, the longer-term macro trends of news avoidance and political disengagement are too significant to be ignored.
Communication teams and agencies in particular must pay attention to these intertwined indications of disengagement. They are further proof that that the old models of changing hearts and minds at scale are less effective than ever.
Successful campaigning in 2024 requires a focus on meeting people where they are. That means mainstream media for those who are highly engaged with the news, and democratised media platforms where you can attempt to engage the disengaged. And that also means investing in paid media support for your campaigns, ensuring that you’re reaching the right people (or anyone at all, given how low organic reach is for company pages).
Campaigning also requires a focus on audience understanding - who do you want to reach, what is going on in their worlds, what do they care about. The Labour Party ran its election campaign on 18-hour feedback loops - focus groups in the evening, results of message testing passed on at 6am briefings, audience permanently front of mind. If we know 40% of the UK’s population has disengaged from news and politics, what are they engaged with? How can we be more relevant to them to spark their interest?
Finally (because everything comes in threes), successful campaigning in 2024 requires us to think about how we engage audiences. Ed Davey helped the Lib Dems secure their best-ever performance at a General Election by tapping into voters’ emotions. He did the silly stunts that made us laugh on social media, and he bravely talked about his role as a carer to show his empathetic human side. Studies show that emotionally-led storytelling is more effective at changing opinions. Yet so many campaigns prioritise the facts. Identifying the human lens in your stories, via employees, suppliers or customers, can add emotion to make campaigns stick in people’s minds.
And while conversely, England’s sheer lack of emotion, their “what’s cooler than being cool” ice-coldness was vital to their emphatic penalty shootout win over Switzerland, the lasting image of the game was Bukayo Saka’s smile after putting his penalty away. Saka has been the bright spark during England’s dour performances at Euro 2024, and to see him exorcise some of the demons of his last penalty shootout brought a warm glow to the nation’s hearts. Saka, Cole Palmer, Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden, Ebrechi Eze, Kobbie Mainoo and Marc Guehi all have bright futures ahead of them and can give English football fans plenty of reasons to feel optimistic for the next few years. Perhaps we’ll look back at this time as the point where it all started to come together, for football team and country, the low-key platform on which success can be built.