Attention-seeking stunts, two Hughs and a scattergun approach: Party leaders up the ante as poll day looms

This week the party leaders made their final pleas to voters. The Labour and Lib Dem leaders visited some of their most ambitious targets so far, while the prime minister took a scattergun approach, fighting for votes in even some of the safest of Tory seats.

Watch their journeys this week in our animated map below.

This campaign is being fought on new electoral boundaries, with many constituencies undergoing significant changes since 2019.

For the purposes of this analysis, we use notional results based on calculations by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, honorary professors at the University of Exeter, which estimate the 2019 election seat results if they had taken place on the new constituency boundaries.

Crunch time

We’re fast approaching election day. In their closing gambits, the Conservatives have been trying to claw back straying voters and convince undecided ones, while Labour have endeavoured to stick to the script and avoid any missteps.

The Conservatives are fending off a potential Labour landslide and are fighting on multiple fronts, while both leaders are wary of losing votes to smaller parties or apathy where people believe the result is already a foregone conclusion.

The big picture

It’s been a long five weeks for the Tories, whose campaign has been mired with several high-profile embarrassments: from Sunak’s D-Day gaffe to the growing sleaze scandal surrounding insider betting allegations at Westminster.

This hasn’t helped their attempt to narrow the polls, and the campaign has remained deep in defensive territory throughout. The prime minister has visited seats with an average 25% Conservative majority.

Nearly 9 in 10 (88%) of Sunak’s 51 constituency visits have been to seats his party is defending. Fourteen of those are places where the Conservatives’ closest rivals are the Lib Dems, and the remaining 34 in places where Labour is the strongest challenger.

In contrast, 84% of Starmer’s 44 constituency visits have been to seats Labour are targeting. All but four of them have been places the Tories are defending.

Labour’s challenge has been to generate enthusiasm for a Starmer government. On average, the target seats he has visited need a 10.5 point vote swing to become Labour gains – just above the figure that Tony Blair achieved in 1997.

Labour must achieve higher than this – a record swing of 12 percentage points from the Conservatives – to secure a majority, however, and Starmer has been visiting seats that require a vote swing as high as 18 points.

The Labour leader has mostly steered clear of the primarily Conservative vs Lib Dem battlegrounds in the south, but has ventured to parts of the South East that only Blair has previously managed to conquer.

Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey has seemingly been having the most fun on the campaign trail, with a series of attention-grabbing stunts including photo ops on rollercoasters and dips in the Thames.

All but one of his 40 campaign visits have been to seats the Lib Dems are targeting, including one Labour-held and one SNP-held seat, with the rest of his time spent targeting Conservative-held seats.

Online campaign correspondent

Looking at data from Who Targets Me, Sky’s partner for our Online Campaign Team, we’ve now got a pretty full picture of how the main two parties have using political advertising on social media.

The Conservatives have consistently trailed Labour both in terms of spend and in the number of adverts posted (you’d expect those to correlate).

But there doesn’t seem to be any coherence to the current campaign – not even a strategy of retrenchment, as Tom King from Who Targets Me notes: “it appears there is no directive, and every seat is sorting itself out.”

Labour has maintained its blanket coverage. And the tone of its adverts is very different.

They tend to focus on Labour and its central message: 22 per cent of all of the more than 5,500 adverts they’ve put up have contained the message “Change”.

The Conservatives have been a lot more negative. 83 per cent of their adverts mention Labour – and only 1 per cent mention their own leader Rishi Sunak. It’s definitely a rearguard action.

Hiding in plain sight

One theme that has been shared across the two main parties’ campaigns is their reluctance to send their leaders to the public or large crowds.

Rishi Sunak has been to see small crowds at many business locations, and the micro-management of his audiences was revealed early in the campaign when at one event it transpired that supposed members of the public were Conservative councillors.

Sir Keir Starmer has played on his football links, visiting two stadiums including Northampton Town this week, but has likewise mostly stuck to closely managed events.

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One leader who hasn’t been afraid of crowds is Reform’s Nigel Farage. Starting his campaign on a pub bench in Clacton, this week he had something of a homecoming in Newton Abbot where 1,500 spectators came to see him speak on Monday. The town was the location of UKIP’s headquarters in their heyday.

Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, has also had a much more public-facing campaign in his various campaign stunts.

The Greens are the only ones to have really made use of celebrity endorsement. This week they won the vocal support of two Hughs – chef Fearnley-Whittingstall and actor Grant.

Upping the ante

The types of seats the Labour and Lib Dem leaders have visited have been markedly different this week.

Sir Keir Starmer has been to increasingly more ambitious targets, visiting Leicestershire North West this week which requires an 18-point swing for Labour to gain, the highest on his trail so far.

That’s also been the trend for Sir Ed Davey. In the final week of campaigning, he’s visited seats where the Liberal Democrats need a swing of 17 points on average to gain, up from 12 points in the previous week.

The prime minister has been less consistent. Indicative of the broad coalition of voters that Johnson built and Sunak has to defend, his visits have spanned from the most marginal defences to what should be the safest of majorities.

Popular places

Over the last 37 days, the three English main party leaders have made 135 visits to 119 unique constituencies. That’s more than 18% of the UK’s seats covered by Sunak, Starmer and Davey.

The seats with the most visits, at three apiece, are Redcar in the North East, Wimbledon in London, and Sunak’s own constituency Richmond & Northallerton in Yorkshire.

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Redcar, visited twice by Sunak and once by Starmer, is a Conservative defence where the Conservative minister candidate is looking vulnerable to Labour.

Davey has his sights set on the highly marginal seat of Wimbledon in London, which the Lib Dems have never won before. He’s visited twice, while Sunak has been to the Conservative defence once on the campaign trail.

And the prime minister has visited his own constituency three times, most recently this week. He defends a 46.9% majority but some MRP polls say there’s a chance he’ll lose it.

Dr Hannah Bunting is a Sky News elections analyst and co-director of The Elections Centre at the University of Exeter.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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