Who Won the Media? Tracking Party Endorsements in the 2024 Election.
Every election, most media outlets and well-known public figures openly declare their support for a particular political party. These endorsements play a massive role in shaping political narratives in an attempt to win voters over to vote for a particular party and to gauge public support.
Using data collected from Wikipedia1,2, this post focuses on how both media (e.g. newspapers and magazines) and individual (e.g. well-known figures and celebrities) endorsements have changed since the previous election by comparing the changes between the two.
The bar chart below shows the number of known media endorsements for each party both for the 2019 and 2024 general election respectively.
It's clear that the media are most likely to endorse the Labour party for the 2019 and 2024 elections. This gap is significantly widened since the 2024 general election, with the Conservatives losing the support of five media outlets and with the Labour party gaining three.
This trend, however, does not translate when considering the number of publicly declared individual endorsements for each party. These results are shown below.
While the Labour Party maintains a healthy lead in terms of public support from individual endorsements, it’s worth mentioning that all three major parties, that is, Labour, Conservative and the Lib Dems, have lost a lot of support with the exception of Reform and the Greens.
Interestingly, Labour have lost a lot of support, which is surprising given their recent election landslide victory. It is difficult to say for sure why this is, but it's possible to speculate that this may be due to tactical voting by anti-Tory voters.
