John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.
May’s local elections will be the last big political test for the Conservatives before the general election. The combination of council and mayoral polls will give a good indication of where the country’s mood sits, and whether the polls are reflecting reality. Most in Westminster are braced for poor results for the Tories and an ensuing rough ride for Rishi Sunak. Beyond winning and losing, another aspect of the locals matter – the chance to battle-test the Conservative campaigning machine.
As much as general elections are swayed by national policy, local campaigning has its role too. Wherever the polls end up by election day, there will still be seats that go down to the wire and where a concerted effort at finding and motivating Tories will make a real difference. May’s elections will provide a crucial real-life audit for many campaigns.
The 2024 election will be a real challenge for many associations. The falling popularity of the party will make once comfortable seats into battlegrounds, but the difficulty goes beyond that. In the last two elections, the party could rely on a swell of enthusiasm among members. This was partly driven by the belief that elections would be won, but also the promise of Brexit, which inspired many recruits to get involved. The mood now feels very different.
First, there was Covid. Although it almost seems like a distant memory now, the lockdowns severely disrupted political activity. The 2020 elections were entirely postponed, while in 2021 lockdown rules limited the campaigning timetable. For associations and members, this was a big disruption to the regular campaigning routine and knocked many out of the habit of getting involved.
The political events that followed have not helped the situation. The disruption of two leadership contests and a huge drop in the polls influenced morale. Pulling people out to knock on doors is never easy, but it gets harder when the party feels like it is on the downswing. The local elections present a real opportunity for the party to re-enthuse members about fighting for candidates on their doorstep, away from the intrigues and moves of Westminster.
Moreover, campaigning now gives the party as a whole a chance to readjust to the new political landscape. Partly this is practical. The boundary reviews have created a whole raft of new seats, while others have lost or gained new blocks of voters. To get the best out of the general election, associations and candidates will need to rebuild their mental map of their patch, and to know when to focus when the time comes.
Even without the boundary changes, the places the party can rely on will likely have moved. Canvass returns pulled together when the party was on a high in 2019 are not the best guide for where things stand now. People will have changed their minds but will not have done so uniformly. The current campaign offers an opportunity to see where the vote is holding up and the types of votes the party needs to work more on.
Good local activity can offer a corrective to people’s disappointment with the national party. Polling shows that lots of Conservative voters have drifted into the Don’t Know column over the last couple of years. Mostly this will be out of disenfranchisement with the Westminster party, which means they might still listen when it’s local activists speaking to them. Engaging with these voters also offers the opportunity to seize on the bread-and-butter issues that concern them, and, where new candidates are standing, to get them known. This could all provide a vital boost when Westminster elections come around.
It’s also an important time to check that the mechanisms of the party are functioning properly. Every seasoned campaigner knows the problems that can happen when different bits of the campaign are off-kilter, whether it is VoteSource going down at crucial moments, or a divergence between local and national targeting. In 2017 in particular, this was a cause of major frustration as the campaign went on and arguably dented the party’s ability to pull in crucial votes. The locals represent a last chance to kick the tyres on this and iron out as many issues as possible ahead of a national poll.
The final thing that matters in the local campaigns is giving members the sense that they are valued. The party has often been accused of taking street-pounding volunteers for granted. Where there are grumbles about leadership votes and candidate selection, this can feel especially acute.
With the local results likely to be bad, many will be dispirited, and handling that badly could see enthusiasm fall even further ahead of the general election. This would be disastrous for the campaign when Labour are likely to have a rush of enthused volunteers. Keeping morale up will be a vital part of mitigating the worst possible results.
With just a few weeks to go, local campaigns should be firing on all cylinders. For many councillors, the work done in the next few weeks could make the difference between victory and defeat. Whatever the results achieved, the campaign will test just as much as the outcomes. For the party, it is the last real chance to see what is working well, where volunteers are turning out, where Tory voters are, and how good the system is at ensuring they turn out.
Ground campaigning will be hugely important to how well the party does. The success of the short campaign largely depends on the work done now. Getting members motivated to campaign, finding where to best target efforts, and smootly running operations are the essentials of a functioning election push.
Between now and May is the best chance the party has to build and stress test these before the bigger contest. While the political consequences of the local elections will grab the headlines, the insight it gives into the strength of the party could be just as important for those with an eye on the general election.
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Author: John Oxley
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