The five groups of voters the Tories are targeting

Tory MPs used to think they could rely on telltale signs while out on the campaign trail — a detached house or a neatly kept lawn — to help them find their target voters. These days, things are more complicated. The Tories’ electoral strategy now rests on persuading voters who have never voted Conservative in their lives to go blue. To help candidates and activists in their efforts, the party has sent them a handbook setting out who they need to win over. It identifies the following groups as being pivotal to Tory success:

Labour Leave voters

Top of the list are the Labour Leave voters who backed Brexit but probably voted Labour in both 2017 and 2015. These are the same voters whom Theresa May targeted in the last election but, as the book explains, ‘many of these people may have been considering a vote for the Conservatives but by polling day they returned home to Labour’. Tory candidates are told not to be put off approaching these voters even if on paper they seem unlikely to vote for them. Campaign strategists hope that a slicker campaign will help their cause, along with the sense that this time round the Tories are not on the brink of winning a landslide majority.

Soft Labour voters

The Tories also believe they stand a chance with soft Labour voters who are not particularly worked up either way about the UK’s departure from the EU: ‘These are people who traditionally choose between us and Labour. The kind of people we targeted during the general election in 2015, but whose votes we may have lost last time round.’