Workington Man: a history of the general election target voter from Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman They’re not very engaged with politics, but they’re very much vital to party strategies – and have been for decades

With the election looming, pollsters and party strategists are scrambling again to answer an age-old question: who do we need to convince if we want to win?

Any victorious party leader builds a coalition: Tony Blair in 1997 kept the traditional Labour heartlands and added aspirational middle-class voters, while David Cameron in 2015 hoovered up moderate former Lib Dem voters on his left, and referendum-enthusiastic former Ukip voters on his right.

Who does Boris Johnson need to target? According to right-leaning think tank Onward, it’s Workington Man.

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This northern character comes after a long line of men and women, from Essex to Lancashire and usually driving a Mondeo, who have come to represent the ideal target voter.

Here’s what you need to know about Workington Man – and his ancestors.

Workington Man

Onward Think Tank, 2019

Workington Man, thought up Onward, lives in Workington in Cumbria, or another one of the rugby league towns in the north-west of England.

He’s over 45, he didn’t go to university and he thinks the country’s going wrong economically and culturally. He also voted Leave – but his vote’s up for grabs for the Tories.

Workington Man is key to Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings’ electoral strategy, which appears to have abandoned Scotland and moderate Tory areas with high Remain votes – such as London’s orbit – in an effort to appeal to Brexiteers in Labour constituencies.

“It is clear that the Conservatives’ path to victory runs through working class rugby league towns like Workington, Warrington and Wigan, which usually do not give them a second thought – as well as the party’s leafy heartlands in the South of England,” said Will Tanner, Onward’s director.

“To build such a broad coalition, Boris Johnson needs to embrace what we call conservatism for the common good, and offer voters policies that restore a sense of community and protection from the insecurities of modern life, rather than the tax cuts and economic liberalism that Conservatives tend to be known for.”

Typical constituencies: Workington, Halifax, Wigan

Worcester Woman

Pollsters, 1997-present

Worcester Woman is the platonic ideal of the floating, winnable voter for a political campaign, living in a swing seat which voted Conservative throughout Thatcher, Labour throughout Blair and then Conservative again beginning in 2010.

Narrowly defined, she is in her 30s and not especially interested in politics but motivated by quality of life for herself and her two children.

More broadly, she is spinnable: a message could resonate with Worcester Woman enough to win her vote, because her tribal affiliation with a party is non-existent and she does not follow politics .

In the post-2008 world, Labour MP Caroline Flint identified Worcester Woman’s replacement as “Aldi Mum” – a mother who is middle class but facing a squeeze, a version of Worcester Woman for whom things now feel worse.

Typical constituencies: Worcester, Watford, Broxtowe

Holby City Woman

David Cameron’s Conservatives, 2010

Holby City woman was identified by Tory strategists trying to pick out a path to remove the 13-year Labour Government from office in 2010.

She is a swing voter, who doesn’t identify heavily with any particular party, and cares about public services such as education, the NHS, social care and childcare – but is accepting of cuts.

She’s in her 30s or 40s, might be a nurse or NHS administrator, and she watches Holby City, or possibly is embodied by Patsy Kensit’s character from Holby City.

Typical constituencies: Patsy Kensit’s character from Holby City lives in Bristol, but Holby City Woman herself is general across the country.

Motorway Man

Financial Times, 2010

Locking horns with Holby City Woman in 2010 was Motorway Man, the successor to Essex Man and Mondeo Man. He’s aspirational and he drives – because he lives in a newbuild house in a “less environmentally attractive” part of the country and needs the motorway to get around.

Usually young “ish” and childless, the middle manager has a surprisingly large number of specific traits: he lives somewhere in a belt between Milton Keynes to the south and Yorkshire towns the north, in the M1, M6 or M61 corridor, in a housing estate built as “infill” over a former mine, in a place with a less strong community than in days of yore.

He searches information for products and services on the internet – something which was less quotidien in 2010 – and is new to managing household finances, having moved out from a Labour town where he was born to a new-build development fairly recently.

Typical constituencies: Milton Keynes North, South Derbyshire, Morley and Outwood, Chorley

Essex Man

Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, retrospectively in the 1990s

Essex Man helped to power Margaret Thatcher’s electoral strategy, being a new demographic emerging in the 1980s. Identified in 1990 by the Sunday Telegraph, Essex Man is not from a traditionally Conservative-voting working class community in the south-east but a new arrival forged by changing circumstances.

Having grown up in a working class community in London, Essex Man moved out of the city as skilled manual work collapsed and settled in Essex, where they sought professional work or became self-employed.

Doing better than their parents, they were less inclined to solidarity than their parents – and more, as most swing voters are, “aspirational”.

Typical constituencies: Southend West, Thurrock, Basildon

Mondeo Man

Tony Blair’s Labour, 1997

A representative of Tony Blair’s effort to build a new coalition, Mondeo Man represents a former Labour voter who flipped to Conservative due to better material conditions.

The former Prime Minister himself recalled meeting the ur-example in 1996, saying: “His dad voted Labour, he said. He used to vote Labour, too. But he’d bought his own house now. He’d set up his own business. He was doing very nicely. ‘So I’ve become a Tory’, he said.”

Mondeo Man was not just a messaging target in 1997 for Blair but a guiding principle of his entire political view – and remains so to this day. The three-term Prime Minister used triangulation to appeal to perceived centre-ground voters rather than pursuing a more left-wing approach – which had failed for the party in the 1980s.

Typical constituencies: see Essex Man

Related concepts

White Van Man

White Van Man is a man who drives a white van for work – usually an independent tradesman.

The concept is not primarily political – they’re considered aggressive drivers, for one thing – but does crop up, as it did when Emily Thornberry was forced to resign from Ed Miliband‘s Labour shadow cabinet for posting a picture of a white van outside a house in Rochester, Kent, draped in England and West Ham flags.

Reagan Democrat

A floating voter concept in America, the Reagan Democrat is a traditionally Democrat-voting working class white person in California and the Rust Belt who changed their vote to Ronald Reagan or either George Bush.

The Reagan Democrat is winnable with an optimistic and patriotic pitch that is right-wing on areas such as immigration and security – and benefited from the economic liberalisation of the Reagan era in the same way as the Essex Man.