Winning the communications battle online is now an inescapable reality for parties wishing to reach younger voters, writes Georgia Hussey
SET against a backdrop of high unemployment and slow growth, the re-election of Barack Obama was a feat that has not gone unnoticed this side of the Atlantic in the run-up to 2015 British general election. The pattern of sitting governments being ousted during the economic downturn is a tough one to break. A large part of his success has been attributed to Obama’s monopoly on the ethnic minority vote, but winning the youth vote also formed a key part of his campaign strategy. And while he presided over a youth unemployment rate of around 17 per cent in the lead-in to 2012, he still won 60 per cent of young people’s votes. How Obama went about building this support is something British politics should learn from.
In an interview for the new edition of IPPR’s journal, Juncture, Obama’s chief strategist in his 2008 and 2012 campaigns, David Axelrod, commented on how critical the youth vote now is in the United States. ‘In 2008, 18 per cent of the electorate [those who turned out to vote] were under 30. In 2010, 12 per cent of the electorate were under 30, which is why we took such a beating in the midterm elections. According to the exit polls, 19 per cent of the electorate were young in 2012.’
But, while the numbers of young people active in politics has been growing in the US, the opposite is true in the UK. In the 2010 general election, of the 6.2 million young people eligible, 3.5 million did not vote. That means that young people account for 22 per cent of all ‘lost votes’. Add to that the swing votes of young people who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010, and parties on the left and right have over four million reasons to court the youth vote ahead of 2015. But, more importantly, more needs to be done to mobilise and engage a young population who are under-represented, disengaged and resentful of politics. And Obama’s digital campaign provides some pointers to how we can tackle this. ‘Young people are accepting information much less from the traditional media or even television ads,’ says Axelrod. ‘It’s now more from Facebook and offerings that come from people they trust – friends and colleagues. The more you can get relevant information to voters through their friends, the more credible and motivational it is.’
‘We put a lot of effort into the digital space for that reason, and because the news-gathering habits of people are still balkanised. The younger you skew, the less likely you are to reach those people through traditional means, so social media and the internet was extremely important to us.’
Until relatively recently political messages could spread to the public through a limited number of channels, but that is no longer the case. And this is particularly true for young people. Just 38 per cent of young Britons say they read a daily newspaper, whereas 89 per cent use YouTube on a regular basis. Twice as many 18 year olds use Facebook than are registered to vote, according to analysis by the Electoral Commission. In 2010, 14,000 registration forms were downloaded from the commission’s Facebook page and 40 per cent of those visiting its About My Vote website were between 18 and 25.Utilising those platforms could have a real effect on getting young people to the polling station.
The Obama campaign grasped this from the very beginning. Announcing his bid for the presidency in 2007 with a video about the candidate’s life, Obama’s campaign went on to launch a web platform a year later that allowed supporters to interact, create their own pages and blogs and even join a phonebank from wherever they were logged in. The campaign invested heavily in video in order to get messages across, and successfully so – it uploaded 1,792 videos in the run-up to polling day in 2008. The Republican candidate, John McCain, meanwhile, managed only 329 videos, giving Obama 905 per cent more viewers than his opponent.
The 2012 campaign saw more big investment in Obama’s digital strategy. Sending out emails calling for tech experts to help ‘wage the most innovative and effective digital campaign in history’, the digital team was boosted by 36 high-level web developers, analysts and digital marketing experts. Obama was not the first politician to use interactive web platforms and social media, but an aggressively comprehensive combination of various platforms, with tailored messages to fit those platforms, made his the most successful example of this.
British politics should learn from this strategy and the success it brought. The White House website has links to photos and videos, podcasts, live streams and mobile apps. The Conservative party has some photos, but to view them you are redirected to a Flickr page, which commits the cardinal sin of taking you away from the website. The Liberal Democrat website is even less engaging.
The Labour party is starting to take a lead on this. One of the best aspects of whitehouse.gov is that you can make petitions, get involved in existing campaigns and have a look at what other people are saying about key topics. Similarly, Labour now has an interactive online Campaign Engine Room, which proclaims, ‘Online campaigns are changing – so Labour is changing too.’ The party’s membersnet, an online platform which enables party members to find out what is going on locally and chat to other members, is a step in the right direction, so long as the party sorts out the aesthetics a little.
But Labour could, and should, be doing more still. What political parties in the UK need to learn is that they can no longer be rigid in the channels they use to campaign with – they have to deliver messages over many channels, with the content optimised for each. Whether a person’s preferred platform is Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest or Tumblr, it is the job of a campaign to get onto those channels and engage. And simply giving people information is no longer enough – things like Call2Action, a widget that can add tools to videos that viewers can click on to take action while the video plays can take YouTube campaigning to the next level. Twtpoll, Tweetvite and TwitterLocal are all Twitter apps that could work really well in getting voters engaged in issues.While people enjoy taking online polls and having their voice heard through online petitions, they are also sharing valuable information about themselves, their likes and dislikes. The Obama campaign used digital tools to closely map young people’s interests and voting intentions which, according to Axelrod, ‘allowed people in the field to target voters, to understand them and what information was relevant to them, which made our field operations more effective and impactful’.
A well-thought-out digital campaign is not enough in itself to get young people re-engaged with politics. Even the most innovative digital campaign could not, perhaps, have saved Mitt Romney, and a great deal of Obama’s success was down to his message. But, on a number of levels, digital technology is now an essential part of campaigning. Any party hoping to gain a majority in Britain in 2015 will need to understand this.
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38 Degrees branches out
With over one million members, 38 Degrees is an example of how digital campaigning can really successfully engage a 
wide range of people not normally active in politics. Their ‘Save Our Forests’ campaign, which opposed the coalition’s planned sell-off of public forest land, started with a member posting on its Facebook page. Hundreds of emails, Facebook comments and Twitter posts turned into an online petition which, a week later, had been signed by more than half a million people. They then sent out emails to MPs, put out adverts and posters, and after a few weeks the government retreated. The 38 Degrees website is set up to allow this kind of grassroots online campaign – its online community talk to each other and take actions on a variety of issues, with links making it easy to share campaigns with friends, to donate, or to find out about campaign updates.
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Georgia Hussey is a video producer and web editor working at IPPR
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Photos: BarackObama.com; Liza Gough Danies