Have the Conservatives given up on winning a majority? Not according to their ad strategy

When Rishi Sunak unveiled his compulsory national service policy in week one of the general election campaign some felt it was a clear signal that the Conservatives have no intention of winning a majority.

Not because the votes of the young people that will be directly impacted by the policy will be essential to a general election majority, but because parents of teenage-age children most certainly will be. 

Age is the best predictor of which party a voter will support. When the Tories won their sizeable majority in 2019 the age when more people voted Tory than Labour was 39. In 2017 when the Tories only managed to be the largest party in a hung parliament the ‘switchover’ age was 47.

If one is oversimplifying it, if a majority is won it will be done so by winning the largest share of the votes of people aged 36 to 50. This is a group of people who are very likely to have children in school.

The idea of sending little Jimmy and Jane off to join the army (particularly given the live conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza) is unlikely to inspire much sympathy amongst mums and dads.

If the Conservatives plan to prevent a massive Labour majority by focusing their energy on people most likely to be supportive – rather than risk resources on people they’re less likely to win over – it would mean lavishing older people with attention.

So when the Conservatives followed up their national service policy with the launch of the “triple lock plus” – a new pledge to prevent the state pension from ever being taxed – it seemed like confirmation that the party are concentrating exclusively on their 55+ core.

The Spectator’s Katy Balls quotes an anonymous former cabinet member as saying “Rishi has been told by his strategists: you can’t win this. But you can lose with 200 MPs rather than 100 by love-bombing the pensioners”.

It’s easy to see how a party performing well amongst 55+ year-olds could end up winning 30% of Parliamentary seats, partly because it’s the demographic most likely to vote. Data from the 2019 British Election Study Post-Election Random Probability Survey shows that the age groups with the highest turnout were 55-64 years old and 65+ years old.

However, the theory that the Conservatives are deploying a 200-seat ‘Dunkirk strategy’ falls after a thorough review of their advertising.

Yes, the Conservatives are running some ads which target exclusively older people. For example, one ad promoting their triple lock plus pensions policy is reaching almost exclusively people aged 45+.

But for almost every other topic on Meta, the reach is broader, with people of all ages seeing ads. There is definitely an older skew on the people seeing the ads. It’s unclear if this is because they’ve created a lookalike of their Page Likes or of a database they’ve created (via petitions etc). But there’s often no cap on younger audiences and on the majority of ads, a significant number of 45+ year olds are being reached. 

We can see in the Meta audience data when an age cap has been put in place. For example, in an ad which uses the 80s quiz show Blankety Blank as a creative vehicle, there is no reach for anyone under 45. This is because the Tories will have put an age limit on it, probably because anyone under that age won’t have seen the show and so won’t understand the reference.

But on the bulk of the Conservatives’ ads on Meta, a cap isn’t imposed.

Similarly, on Google’s political ad transparency site one can see whether age targeting has been implemented and there is no exclusion of younger voters on any of their ads.

And whilst there is a lot of focus on pensions in the Conservatives’ advertising, a range of other issues are also addressed. 

For example, there are ads which attack Keir Starmer for wanting to cut the number of apprenticeships. And there are ads promoting the Conservatives’ policy on free childcare.

The Conservatives are also investing resources in creating content for their new channel on TikTok, which isn’t a platform known for being overly populated by people susceptible to grey hairs.

Are the Conservatives doing everything they can to perform as well as they can with people aged 55+? Absolutely. But are they giving up on everyone else after only a week of the campaign? Not according to their advertising strategy.