Saturday, February 20, 2016

Looking forward to the Welsh Assembly electioneering

Long-time readers of this blog may know that I have reviewed election leaflets posted through my door (here's last year's General Election one). So far we have had one leaflet in the run up to this year's Welsh Assembly elections. It is being kept safe to one side to be reviewed with the others I'm anticipating will come through the door.

For some reason I didn't do a full review of election leaflets in the last Assembly elections back in 2011. I'm a bit annoyed with myself now for not doing that, but I had a lot on I guess and I didn't know posts about election leaflets would be so popular (last year's general election one was the most viewed blog post in 2015).

Of course, over time, I have collected quite a bit of data (when I've been bothered to!) and so here is a graph of the amount of election bumf that has been shoved through our doors since 2007.

Election leaflets through the letterbox 2007-2015

Some things are fairly obvious. It's a Labour safe seat but we always get a few leaflets from them, but not too many. The Liberal Democrats seem to have died off since 2010. We got none from them last year and they were prolific before that. (In fact, all their inter-election 'Focus' papers and stuff seem to have disappeared as well.) UKIP went through a 'U' of their own, with zero leaflets in 2010 to pushing the most through our letterbox in 2015. Partly I think this is because we have a Kipper in our street, which might explain why we get so many leaflets from them. (We know he's a Kipper because he puts the posters up in his windows.)

I'm interested to see what we get this year. None of the main political parties seem flush with cash or, more crucially, have many determined, committed local supporters. I think that's what's done for the Lib Dems as a force in this area. It will be interesting to see whether UKIP sustain their levels of communication. They might be saving their ammo for the EU referendum six weeks later.

Anyway, I'll rate the leaflets nearer the time, I promise. No repeat of 2011 here. In the meantime, if you want to catch up on previous ratings, here is the complete list.
General Election 2015


No comments:

Post a Comment