Those who believed Labour would win the last general election had faith not only in opinion polls but also in our superior capacity to reach target voters in marginal constituencies.
Both, of course, turned out to be illusory. Despite investing millions of pounds in our “ground game” and activists breaking all records for knocking on doors, the polls were wrong: we did not gain seats but lost them.
Any analogue-age advantage Labour once had on the doorstep was ground into digital dust during the 2015 election. The Tories used advanced data science techniques to identify and target groups of voters. These were then contacted in a format they would prefer, often through big spending on Facebook ads, with messages tailored to them according to as many as 1,000 pieces of personal information.
Andrew Cooper, the Conservative strategist, made no attempt to conceal his scorn immediately after the election. “Big data, micro-targeting and social media campaigns,” he tweeted, “just thrashed ‘5 million conversations’ and ‘community organising’.”
This time, Jeremy Corbyn has more youthful activists than ever, as well as the opinion poll momentum that comes from the prime minister steadily disintegrating before us. But the question, on which the result of this tighter-than-expected election may yet turn, is whether the Tories still have mastery over this new domain.
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The Conservatives have rehired Jim Messina, the US consultant who used data science to help Barack Obama and David Cameron achieve victory in 2012 and 2015, as well as the rest of their digital communications team from the last election. But there are suggestions from within the Tory camp that Messina’s arrival in the UK this spring came far too late for him to produce the same detailed data models that had been carefully calibrated for three years before the 2015 election began. The targeting of voters in this election is inevitably less precise, just as it was when Messina turned up similarly late to help Cameron and the “remain” campaign in last year’s referendum.
The Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections in November also showed that the application of such techniques, especially targeted Facebook advertising, is not the monopoly of one consultant or one party. Indeed, the “leave” campaign, as well as that of Donald Trump, obtained and used vast amounts of voter data in ways that are only beginning to be properly understood.
Although Labour promises to spend upwards of £1m on Facebook ads, there is no sign that it has pockets deep enough or the data to copy the kind of campaigns run by Vote Leave and Trump. Nor, so far at least, is there much evidence that this election has been distorted and disabled like the US presidential election was by a deluge of fake news, Russian cyber-hacking or an invading army of web robots relentlessly pushing the message of unseen “bot masters”.
According to the Oxford Internet Institute, which published interim findings last week, UK voters were generally sharing a higher quality of news than their counterparts in the US, the amount of Russian-sourced material was negligible, and bots were generating less content in this election than they had in the Brexit referendum.
But the problem is that this whole subject is so opaque that it remains beyond the reach of regulators or even proper scrutiny. In the old days, billboard and newspaper advertisements could not only be seen by everyone but also had to conform to basic industry standards with the Tories being ordered to take down their “devil eyes” ads against Tony Blair in 1997. Now “dark posts” tailored to your prejudices can appear from a political party on your Facebook page and be seen by no one but you.
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Facebook does not allow researchers access to any of its data and the Oxford Internet Institute’s findings are based on an analysis of the 1% of traffic to which Twitter gives it access.
One group, Who Targets Me?, is trying to monitor this hidden election by recruiting more than 8,000 people to use an app that automatically records Facebook ads. Its data shows Labour outgunning the Conservatives in numbers of views. But, according to Louis Knight-Webb, one of its founders, such rankings “are ultimately at the mercy of our users’ demographics”. He suggests that looking at the number of likes and video views of individual ads give a much better indication of the parties’ reach.
On this basis, a recent Tory post using carefully edited footage to suggest Corbyn refused to condemn the IRA has been viewed at least 5.6m times, making it the most watched attack video in British political history. Knight-Webb says “most of that will have be paid for” by Facebook advertising rather than the video going viral through “organic” shares and likes.
This is an era when politics, like other industries, is being automated. In years to come we may wonder why we ever needed strategists to devise a message, spin doctors to drive it or canvassers to deliver it when these tasks can all be done by algorithms.
Theresa May gets a lot of criticism for sounding like a robot. But she might just be a sign of things to come.
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Tom Baldwin is a former director of strategy and communications for the Labour Party