Gina Broadhurst says there's little the Conservative Party can do to change its mind. Photo: Jeff Gilbert
In the run-up to every general election, a certain breed of voters is identified as crucial to the success of the winning party.
For Tony Blair, it was the “Mondeo man,” for David Cameron, the “worcester woman” ”, and for Theresa May it was the seemingly “Brenda from Bristol”, whose “not another” reaction to the 2017 elections seemed to speak for the entire electorate. .
With Tories trailing Labor by more than 20 points in the polls, Rishi Sunak faces a tough task: convincing 2019 Conservative voters to love the party that saw off two prime ministers into space again. two months and is now on the verge of pre-election oblivion.
Today's data suggests that if the prime minister has any chance of success, he should be courting middle-aged women, who strategists say will have the most influence in the polls by 2024.Often the most politically active individuals in any household, women have long been considered an important target for political parties. In addition to making up more than half of the British electorate, women voters are generally more likely than men to change their party affiliation. They are also the voters who engage most with political issues on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Instagram. The prime minister's unique advantage is supposed to be his ability to please women of a certain age with his schoolboy charm and competence. So it will be especially troubling for Sunak that three groups of women have been identified who are determined not to vote Conservative next time.
If he loses these groups, then he's finished. So, who are the middle-class women who are considered mission-critical, and what can they teach Sunak?
National Confidants
First, there are National Council dog-walkers who “have great appreciation for the local environment.” Wednesday” and turned their backs on the Tories in this year's local elections, largely out of disgust at water companies pumping sewage into their local rivers and lakes.
< p>Violent supporters of longtime British institutions, these members of the National Trust have been rebuffed by Boris Johnson's antics and crave Sunak's strength and stability – if only he can convince them that his five-point plan is the solution to all Britain's ills. If he fails to deliver his “results”, then he will drink a toast to this demographic of serious doers.
Critical groups: Gloucester (Conservative majority: 10,277); Hastings and Rye (Conservative Majority: 4,043); Dorset South (Conservative Majority: 17,153).
Female Voters 1 
Kate Graham-Cook
Keith Graham-Cook describes himself as someone who has “always been a typical Tory voter”. She comes from a Conservative, rural oriented background, born and raised in the Dorset countryside and now lives in Devon, where she works as a writer and fundraiser for charity. She voted for Brexit, which she now considers “a huge opportunity that was really missed.”
Graham Cooke has not yet decided who will get her vote next, but she is sure of one thing: she will not elect the Conservatives in the general election. “Absolutely not now,” she says firmly.
Why not? “After 13 years in government, we have to move a lot further,” she says, criticizing the party for a range of policy mistakes, from “short-term decisions,” such as a stamp duty holiday between July 2020 and October 2021, to long-term ones. failures in housing and infrastructure.
“Starting in the 1980s, conservatives encouraged people to view their property as a way to make money, not as a home, and this was incredibly harmful,” she says, because it raised prices.
The sale of council houses was “absolutely useless” because not enough houses were being built to replace them, she said. “Purchase assistance [introduced by George Osborne when he was Chancellor to help first-time shoppers] was pretty irresponsible, again because of the way it raised prices, don't make me start with the NHS.”
Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson was “a great campaigner” but “useless as a strategist.”
While she admires her local Conservative MP, Anthony Mannall, who represents Totnes and South Devon, she believes the national picture is far more important. So which side can she turn to? “I will see what happens. I would definitely consider Liberal Democrats or Labor. Definitely not a Tory.”
As for what Rishi Sunak's party could do to win back her support, it looks like they don't have time. “I think it's too late,” she says. “In the future, maybe [I would think about conservatives again]. But I don't see how they can get together in the next 18 months or so.”
What Sunak can learn from losing my vote: “No more short-term solutions… get your act together quickly”
Women's Institute staff
The next group Sunak needs to give back to the conservatives are the Women's Institute members now persecuted by Labor despite being known to slowly clap their hands at Tony Blair in 2000.
These ladies who bake pies and drink tea have also dealt with Boris and Brexit, but remain skeptical that the uncharismatic Sir Keir Starmer has what it takes to steer the UK in the right direction. Little “s” conservatives at heart, they worry that Labor and the Liberal Democrats will concrete the countryside, but they need Sunak to convince them that his NHS workforce plan will shorten waiting lists and make it easier for patients to access full-time care. – personal appointments.
Critical Groups: Somerset North East (Conservative majority: 14,729); Shrewsbury and Atcham (Conservative majority: 11,217); Truro and Falmouth (Conservative Majority: 4561).
Women Voters 2 
Catherine Houston Photo: Andrew Crowley
For the vast majority of her adult life, Katherine Huston never considered voting for anything but the Conservative. Her parents were party members and at the age of 18 she voted blue and would continue to do so for the next 40 years. When her children came of age, she encouraged them to follow the same path.
It was under David Cameron that she felt her first remorse. “It's like boiling a frog,” she says. “My dislike of the Tories did not develop overnight. It started with a feeling of discomfort that the party was not entirely truthful and did not put the country first. I began to read, and it awakened me to the idea that not everything is as presented.
Houston had mixed feelings about the Brexit referendum – she could see the good and the bad in the EU and didn't feel competent enough to make such an important call; in the end, she decided to vote Stay when she saw people like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin advocating Quit.
It was in the post-Brexit years that her concerns about the Conservatives became serious. “I was very angry – there was a feeling that we were lied to and did not cope with anything.”
But the mood in the small village of Shalford, near Guildford, has really changed thanks to partygate. , where she lives with her husband.
“I found Boris Johnson more and more contemptible,” she says. “He single-handedly destroyed so much beauty in this country. I remember 2012 and the Olympics, and there was such a feeling of joy in the country, and Boris tore it apart.”
By this point, Houston had decided to leave the Conservative Party and join the Liberal Democrats. She became an advisor, began handing out flyers and knocking on doors, and found that other Tories throughout her life were just as angry as she was. “One middle-aged man in the Army said he would never vote Conservative again because his father died and he couldn't be with him [during quarantine]. I've heard stories like this over and over.”
Always a Conservative, Shalford switched to the Liberal Democrats in the May 2023 local elections, and Houston believes Rishi Sunak has done little to calm voter anger. No wonder she thinks her constituency of Godalming and Ash, which belongs to Jeremy Hunt with a majority of 8,000, will turn too.
“People are very attached to the way they have always voted and changed your party. may feel like a change in blood type. But the Conservative Party makes it very easy.”
What Sunak can learn from losing my vote: “Stop putting the party ahead of the country. And respect our anger.”
The Surrey Shifters
The so-called Surrey werewolves are the third group of middle-class women Sunak must find a way to draw attention to. These 25-45-year-old women with young children have left London and are now in constituencies where the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are fighting. Often having to balance work and motherhood, can these left-wing townspeople be convinced to vote conservative with the right family-friendly policies? Blair's famous mantra of “education, education and more education” is the group's top priority as the main reason they switched to sticks is to secure their coveted place at an outstanding Ofsted rated school. With large mortgages and huge spending, they are also the most vulnerable to inflation and rising interest rates, meaning that the success of Sunak's high-tax economic plan will be critical to their vote.
Critical groups< /strong>: Asher and Walton (conservative majority: 2743); Guildford (Conservative majority: 3,337); Woking (Conservative majority: 9,767); South West Surrey (Conservative Majority: 8817).
Female Voters 3 
Gina Broadhurst Posted by Geoff Gilbert
Like many people, Gina Broadhurst loved living in London in her carefree twenties and thirties. But as soon as she had children, she realized that she could not create for them the lifestyle she wanted in the capital, and so she moved with her family of four to the suburban Surrey town of Walton-on-Thames.
As the country transitions to a hybrid work culture, thousands of millennials and Gen Xers are leaving the cities and moving to rural areas. This is bad news for the Conservatives: they have lost virtually all of their seats in London over the past decade, but the counties outside the hinterland have remained consistently blue. New arrivals violate this pattern.
Broadhurst is one of them. “I'd rather walk on broken glass than tick off the Conservatives in the next election,” she says. She has voted Tory in the past but is now appalled by the party's disdain for the environment and points to a day in April this year when raw sewage was pumped into the local Mole River for nearly six hours. Dominic Raab, who is her MP (for Escher and Walton), did not show up to vote on the laws to stop this. “I can never forgive him for this. We live on the Thames, and my children are Sea Scouts – it breaks my heart to see what is happening to them.”
The poisoning of British waterways, she believes, lies entirely with the Conservatives, and she is convinced that the water industry should never have been privatized: “Profits should have gone back into the sewer system, which would have allowed them to do things like deepen rivers, and not be given to shareholders.”
At the next general in the election, the Liberal Democrats are likely to get her vote as she is still wary of Labor after Corbyn's rule. At the moment, there is little the Conservative Party can do to change its mind. “Nothing could make me vote for them.”
What Sunak can learn from losing my vote: “Renationalize the water industry—oh, and replace yourself.”
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