Surprising Statistics from the UK 2015 Election to Inform Your Next Political Campaign

Campaigns for the snap election are in full swing and with only a few weeks left to build votes, candidates are concentrating hard on delivering their strategies for the future of the UK. Millions are spent on every election, with parties driving their message as forcibly as possible. Elections can easily match the most strategic and expensive marketing campaigns of global corporations, so we wanted to understand how politicians spend this money and where they concentrate their efforts.

These statistics reveal that the Conservatives spent significantly more than their competitors on their 2015 Election campaign. Although there is much more to a political campaign than marketing, it makes an enormous difference to awareness and support if a political party’s policies are communicated in an effective way. For example, we can see in this year’s campaign that the Labour party are focusing a lot of their marketing efforts on appealing to younger people, who some argue have been overlooked in previous elections. The party have been encouraging younger people to vote and getting the backing of popular influencers. The opinion polls are already showing that this is proving to be successful.

The EU referendum took place in June 2016, where a vote decided the fate of the UK leaving or remaining as a member of the EU. The referendum divided friends and family as opinions became stronger and stronger. As we all know, the result came in as a decisive ‘Leave’.

When looking into the spend statistics for this campaign, we wondered if money spent could have been a direct factor to deciding this result as well. The money spent on the referendum came out at an eye-watering £32million, making it the most expensive referendum in UK political history. This spend went on everything from running polling stations to printing stickers and flyers.

In summary, these statistics have opened our eyes to the huge differences in spend across the five main parties in previous elections. With some parties choosing to focus on print and some focusing on social media channels, it will be very interesting to see how each political party chooses to spend their money on the run up to the 2017 general election. With such a short amount of time remaining before the vote, how will the campaigners effectively raise support?