You’ve met Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman, now meet the key swing voter Labour hopes will win them the next election: middle-aged mortgage man.
Party insiders say they are being ruthless about targeting exactly the kind of voters they believe will put them back into power, homing in on people who previously lost faith with Labour but have been personally affected by the spike in interest rates caused by Liz Truss’ “mini-budget”.
Just as Labour won in 1997 by targeting upwardly-mobile Mondeo drivers and the Tories in 2010 by focusing on working-class women from Worcester, Starmer’s team believes mortgage man holds the key to success at the next election, likely to be in 2024.
Rob Ford, a professor of political science at Manchester University, describes this archetypical voter as male, 50 years old, without a university degree but with a decent job in the private sector and, crucially, a homeowner with a mortgage. This person almost certainly voted leave, Ford added, explaining Labour’s insistence that it will not take the UK back into the single market.
Ford said: “In 2019, Labour desperately wanted leave voters in Scunthorpe to hear a different message from remain voters in south London, but that strategy didn’t work.
“What they need to do this time is find a median voter who will help them win back the seats they won next time and go after them. That is middle-aged mortgage man.”
One Labour strategist in the leader’s office told the Guardian: “For a long time every time we talked to the public we were trying to talk to four, five different groups of people.
“Going into the next election, we’ve got to have this one person in our minds whenever we’re doing media appearances or advertising. That’s how we will win.”
An analysis by the Guardian of data from the British Election Study shows that after years of steadily gaining ground with middle-aged mortgage man, Labour slumped five points with those voters in 2019, while the Tories gained by nearly a percentage point. This proved crucial in the north and Midlands, where the party lost multiple seats and where the Guardian analysis shows these types of voters are more prevalent.
By May this year, the Tories were down by 22 points among those voters. But Labour was also down just over a point, with 15% saying they simply do not know how they will vote next time.
Appealing to those voters means not showing any sign of wanting to renegotiate the Brexit agreement with the EU, say party insiders – hence Starmer’s unwillingness even to accept that returning to the single market would boost growth.
Ian Lavery, the MP for the north-eastern seat of Wansbeck, said: “Lots of Labour-supporting Brexit voters at the last election thought that our position on Europe was basically telling them that we thought they were wrong. We need to win back trust with exactly those people.”
But winning over middle-aged mortgage man means more than just not giving way on Brexit, say pollsters. It also means keeping the election campaign focused on economic issues, and tapping into the sense of financial insecurity exacerbated by this year’s mini-Budget and the subsequent spike in interest rates.
Labour strategists say they plan to reach these voters largely through local television and radio. But the party has also revamped its digital team under the aegis of digital director, Tom Lillywhite, and is planning a series of digital advertisements to appeal specifically to this group.
Lillywhite is recruiting an army of digital operatives who are being told to find local advocates for Labour who might be better positioned to win back the trust of people like middle-aged mortgage man than the party’s own MPs are.
“We need ordinary people to be our message carriers – people who can say: ‘I used to vote Tory but now I vote Labour,’” said one party insider. “That will give others permission also to cross over.”
But while party leaders plot their way back with middle-aged mortgage man, others worry that it is narrowing Labour’s appeal.
“It’s fine to say that middle-aged men are our priority,” said one senior MP. “But where is our offer to young voters, to voters of colour, to disabled voters? We are at risk here of losing the voters we have worked so hard to turn out in recent elections.”
