Election copywriting and storytelling: the words that win (or sink) a campaign

Let me tell you something that happened nearly twenty years ago — something I still feel like it was yesterday. It was a May evening in Portici. There was that sticky coastal humidity that plasters your shirt to your back, and I was standing on a stage knocked together in a hurry. I was standing as a candidate for the town council. In my pocket was what I thought was the "perfect text": a sixteen-page electoral programme, typed in a tiny font because there was simply too much to say. I had a slogan I thought was brilliant and a poster printed in all the right colours. Yet, as I looked out over the square, the brutal reality hit me: there were forty-seven other candidates standing for the same seat.

Forty-seven people all talking at once. There was the husband of an old school friend, the bloke who six months earlier had been on my own slate and was now looking at me like a stranger, the mate from the café asking "Umberto, what does that bit of paper actually say?". That day I understood that electoral copywriting has nothing to do with literature, nor with conventional advertising. It's a fight for oxygen in an environment saturated with noise.

This is the fourth and final chapter of our series on the 2026 local elections. We've already looked at how design gives shape to a message, how strategic marketing maps needs and coalitions, and how photography and video put a human face on a symbol. Today we get to the beating heart of it all: words. The ones that remain when the posters have been pasted over and the videos have stopped circulating.

The playing field: Italy and the UK compared

Two systems, two completely different emotional grammars

When I work between Naples and Manchester, the first thing that jumps out isn't the language — it's how the structure of the vote shapes the words. In Italy, local elections are a magnificent and terrible mess all at once. Take Portici: 4.5 square kilometres with one of the highest population densities in Europe, where the May 2026 elections will predictably see two centre-left coalitions competing against each other, plus the centre-right — historically fragmented — plus a string of civic lists. Each list fields thirty council candidates. Do the maths: we could quite easily have three hundred candidates in the running for an electorate of fifty thousand people.

This creates a unique communicative paradox: the copy must be simultaneously collective (to get the mayoral candidate elected) and fiercely individual (to secure the personal preference vote). In Italy, words have to work on a slippery surface made up of fluid coalitions, where today's ally could be tomorrow's chief opponent. The history of Portici elections tells of candidates who served in the same administration and are now standing on opposing sides. Of people who signed the same council decisions and are now blaming each other for what went wrong. How do you build a "break with the past" narrative when everyone knows you were there? We'll come back to that.

In the UK, council elections look nothing like that. The First Past the Post system by ward narrows the field considerably: generally three, at most eight candidates per ward. Party identity is a monolith. If you're standing for Labour in Manchester, eighty per cent of your copy is already written by national headquarters. The risk isn't drowning in noise — it's disappearing behind the logo. I've seen English candidates produce impeccably put-together materials that are completely anonymous: take away the photo and you've no idea who they are. They're "the party candidate". Functional in the short term, devastating over time when building a personal mandate becomes essential.

Andy Burnham and the paradox of personal brand in the UK

The most instructive case I know for understanding British political copywriting at a local level is Andy Burnham, the first mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority since 2017. The UK system should crush any aspiration towards personal branding. Burnham did the opposite: he built an identity so strong that he earned the nickname "King of the North" — a title the media gave him and which he shrewdly absorbed without ever explicitly claiming it.

His copy consistently did three things: it framed the North-South divide as a matter of political justice — decades of infrastructure promises (HS2, Northern Powerhouse Rail) systematically scaled back by Westminster, treated as favours rather than rights; it used the conflict with central government as a narrative engine, not as a grievance; it maintained a direct, almost working-class register that deliberately jarred with the institutional language of Westminster. When in 2020 he publicly opposed the COVID restrictions imposed by the Johnson government, his message — a few crisp sentences, no jargon — went viral not because it was strategically engineered to do so, but because it was authentically consistent with everything he'd said in the three previous years. That's what I mean by a winning personal brand in politics: not a clever slogan, but a voice you'd recognise instantly in any context.

The closest Italian parallel is De Magistris in Naples in 2011. The "orange" wave wasn't a verbal slogan: it was a chromatic identity built over years of consistent communication, which transformed a colour into a message of rupture and hope. Two very different political systems, two different ways of building identity. One single principle: consistency over time beats any one-off creative idea, every time.

The paradox of communicative density

In a town of fifty thousand people, if three hundred candidates each print a thousand leaflets, you've got three hundred thousand pieces of paper in circulation within a month. Generic copy — "competence, honesty, renewal" — is white noise. It means nothing. The Italian voter, constantly bombarded by this kind of communication, has developed an automatic filter. They can smell inauthenticity within five seconds.

The only antidote I've found in years of working on local campaigns is surgical copy: fewer adjectives, more action verbs, a rock-solid grounding in the physical reality of the territory. If you talk about "urban regeneration" in Portici, the voter just sees the pothole outside their house that still hasn't been fixed. If you talk about "that specific pothole on Via Roma, outside the primary school, that's been waiting for a council order since 2022", then you've got their attention. As we explored in the article Why you should communicate problems, not solutions, the starting point is never the answer: it's the acknowledgement of the problem the voter is already living with.

How to write an electoral manifesto

The difference between a document and a narrative

Nearly every candidate makes the same mistake: writing their manifesto like a procurement specification. Sixteen pages of numbered bullet points, thematic sections organised by policy area, technical bureaucratic language. The only people who read it are their opponents, looking for contradictions, and the more diligent journalists. The question I always ask my clients isn't "what do you want to do?" but "what's the story you want to tell about this town?". If your story is "Portici as a liveable city", then every point in the manifesto — from waste collection to street lighting — needs to be evidence in support of that argument. The copywriter doesn't "dress up" the manifesto: they draw out its soul.

The 5-phase framework for a manifesto that breathes

1. The Diagnosis

Not "things aren't working". Be specific. Use examples that people encounter every single morning. The diagnosis creates connection because the voter feels understood before they're even persuaded.

2. The Origin

Why you? Why now? Personal storytelling isn't about academic qualifications. It's about explaining what lived experience brought you to say "right, that's enough — I'm going to sort this myself". Credibility isn't declared: it's demonstrated through a real moment.

3. The Proposal (not the objective)

An objective is "more safety". A proposal is "CCTV coverage on every blind corner in the town centre within the first 90 days". The proposal must be visual: people need to be able to picture the future scene.

4. The Measure

Three priorities. Just three. If everything is a priority, nothing is. These three things must be your contract with voters, with a credible timeline attached. Those who make good use of accountability earn a trust that no amount of rhetoric can buy.

5. The Commitment

"Every six months we'll hold a public meeting to show progress." This transforms copy from propaganda into public service. It's the difference between a market trader and a craftsman who puts their name to their work.

BEFORE / AFTER — Rewriting a generic promise

The same idea, handled two completely different ways. You decide which one convinces you.

The case of the "Lungomare degli orari"

For thirty years, Portici had its "great promise": the seafront promenade. A project from the 1990s, revisited, debated, almost mythological. When it was finally completed, local politicians had a genuine moment of communicative panic. The narrative that had held for three decades had vanished. What did those left without a story do? They started squabbling about opening hours.

This is a masterclass in how, in the absence of a new vision, political copywriting clings to micro-conflicts to keep tension alive. But it's also a strategic lesson: when the main promise is delivered, the communicator must build the new pivot narrative before the space is occupied by the opposition. Those who arrive unprepared find themselves defending the opening hours of a public amenity. That's not a tactical defeat: it's a narrative defeat, which is worse.

The right question every electoral copywriter should be asking their candidate today is: "What's the next mental seafront for this town?" Without an answer to that question, the campaign is reduced to managing the status quo. And managing the status quo is never a good enough story to win on.

The slogan: the gilded cage

The slogan is without question the hardest thing to write, because it has to be all things to all people. A gilded cage: too narrow and it excludes chunks of the electorate; too broad and it becomes waffle. I've seen slogans that shifted thousands of votes and others that became jokes before the paste on the posters had even dried.

The 5 rules of steel-cut copy

1. The copy-paste test

If your slogan could just as easily be signed by your worst opponent without changing a single word, it's not your slogan. "For the common good" or "Together for the city" are empty shells.

2. The verb or the concrete image

A noun freezes the mind; a verb sets it in motion. "Beautiful Portici" is a compliment. "Let's make Portici Alive" is a call to action. The difference isn't aesthetic: it's cognitive.

3. The territorial root

A slogan in Caserta needs to "sound" like Caserta — not necessarily in dialect, but in spirit. A common mistake is translating national slogans for local use: it never works.

4. The discipline of cutting

Three words is the magic number. Five is already too many. Boris Johnson's "Get Brexit Done" was a masterpiece of political copy — whatever you think of the content: three words, one verb, one result. Job done.

5. Leaving something important out

A slogan can't say everything. If you choose "Safety", you accept that "Culture" won't feature in the slogan. The strength lies in what you leave out. Those who try to say everything end up saying nothing.

Historical examples: the good, the bad, the catastrophic

✅ The winners — Italy

• De Magistris, Naples 2011: the "orange" wave. Not a verbal slogan: a chromatic narrative that turned a colour into political identity. Pure creative genius.
• Berlusconi, 1994: "L'Italia che voglio" projected an individual desire onto a collective screen. It worked because at that particular moment in history it was the perfect vessel for the expectations of all those who no longer recognised themselves in the old system.
• Renzi, 2014: "Adesso" (Now) — a time adverb turned into a manifesto. It capitalised on the collective impatience with the system's sluggishness. A classic case of a slogan that intercepts an emotion already present within the electorate.

✅ The winners — UK

• Blair/Labour, 1997: "Things Can Only Get Better" was more than a song: it evoked light after years of Thatcherite grey. The perfect slogan isn't the most creative one — it's the one that arrives at exactly the right moment.
• Sadiq Khan, 2016: "London is Open" — born reactively in the wake of the Brexit vote. It transformed a crisis into an extraordinarily powerful identity brand for the city. The best lesson there is in how reactive copy can outperform planned copy.

❌ The disasters

• Ingroia, 2013 ("Cambiare si può" — "Change is possible"): a slogan that answers a question nobody had asked out loud. When you build your message as a response to an implicit objection — "can we really change things?" — you're already operating defensively, accepting the opponent's framing before they've even challenged you. The slogan says a thing is possible. It doesn't say who will do it, how, or when. It opens a door without walking through it. Compare it with Renzi's "Adesso": it answers nothing — it goes straight for the jugular of time. Or "Get Brexit Done": it doesn't say Brexit is possible — it says do it.
• Local catalogue manifestos: I once saw one, in a town in the province of Naples, that listed 23 absolute priorities. Twenty-three. The candidate didn't get enough votes to elect even himself. That's not a coincidence.
• EdStone (Miliband, UK 2015): having promises carved in stone was meant to lend weight to the words. The result: the stone disappears (literally — nobody knows where it is to this day) and the image of Miliband standing next to a monolith remains as the enduring symbol of a candidate who'd lost touch with reality.
• "Strong and Stable" (May, UK 2017): repeated obsessively in every interview until it became a meme. When a slogan is repeated fifty times in twenty minutes, it stops being a message and starts looking like fear dressed up as resolve.

The Tone of Voice: the voice before the words

As we explored in the article on defining brand voice, voice isn't a writing style. It's a system of values that manifests through language. In an electoral campaign that's doubly true: your real voice emerges in the uncontrolled moments — the journalist's surprise question, the rally in the pouring rain, the response to a heckler.

The four parameters of political voice

The Register: are you the "technician" who fixes things or the "visionary" who inspires? In the UK, the technician is highly regarded; in Italy, we need a touch more vision — without tipping over into the ridiculous.

The Dominant Emotion: every campaign has a heartbeat. Is it anger at injustice? Pride in one's roots? The urgency to get things done? Choose one emotion and stay true to it.

The Relationship: "I'll lead you" (paternalistic), "Let's do it together" (participatory) or "I'm here to serve you" (servant-leader). This last one is the tone I'd recommend for 2026: people are thoroughly fed up with leaders on pedestals.

The Tense: the best copy uses the past only as a springboard towards the future. Too much time dwelling on who got it wrong before is time stolen from the story of what you're going to do.

The risk of the "fake young" and the "fake expert"

A sixty-year-old candidate using Gen Z slang on social media is cringe-worthy. A candidate without specific expertise deploying complicated technical jargon to sound knowledgeable is downright dangerous. Your voice must be authentic. If you're a tradesperson who's crossed over into politics, speak like a tradesperson. If you're a teacher, use the clarity of explanation. In a town of fifty thousand people, the wrong tone costs you dearly: if you talk in the language of Downing Street press releases when discussing the car park on Via Garibaldi, people will think you're completely out of touch. Full stop.

Electoral copywriting vs commercial copywriting

Many people think selling a candidate is like selling a yoghurt. There are genuine parallels: the brand promise, the USP, audience segmentation. As we developed in the guide to copy strategy, everything starts from an insight. In politics, the insight is always an emotional tension: what's keeping the people of Portici awake at night? But that's where the similarities end.

The candidate IS the product. With a yoghurt, the CEO doesn't appear on the packaging. The political product speaks, makes mistakes, gets emotional, gets photographed eating a pizza or rowing in a council meeting. The copy has to survive the physical reality of the candidate.

The vote can't be won back. A dissatisfied customer can be recovered with a voucher. A disillusioned voter is gone — and often becomes an activist working against you. Political copywriting operates on long-term trust, not instant transactions.

The market closes on 25 May at 3pm. There's no pivot the following month, no relaunch. Either you've convinced the necessary number of people by that date or you're out. This time pressure shapes the copy: it needs to be sharper, bolder and far more resilient to attack than any commercial campaign.

Attack is part of the game. In commercial communications, directly attacking a competitor is seen as weakness. In politics, it's necessary to define who you're not and what you're fighting against. The copy must respond to blows without losing its dignity — and without losing its own story.

Storytelling: the candidate as protagonist

Storytelling isn't about making things up; it's about organising facts so that they make sense to the person listening. As we explored in the article on the architecture of storytelling in marketing, every narrative that works follows a precise structure. In politics, that structure plays out in three movements.

Origin: the deep connection with the territory. "I was born in this neighbourhood; I watched these shutters come down one by one." One specific geographical detail is worth ten times more than a declared party affiliation.

Rupture: the moment of decision. It must be specific, not vague. "When they decided to close the council nursery, I realised I couldn't just keep moaning about it." If there's no real conflict, there's no story, and if there's no story there's no memory.

Vision: the possible future — concrete and sensory. Not "a more liveable city" but "children walking to school because the streets in this neighbourhood are safe." As explored in the article on potential storytelling, selling a future without lying requires narrative precision: a credible future is always specific.

The problem of political history and coalition narratives

In small towns, almost every candidate has a past. They've switched lists, coalitions, allegiances. The solution isn't to hide it — it's to own it. "I changed position because the values I believed in were no longer represented by that group" is a story. Denial is just a target.

The subtler challenge is that of coalition narrative when you're heading up six different lists. Each one brings its own story, its own electorate, its own interests. The risk is cacophony: thirty voices cancelling each other out. The copywriter must be the orchestra conductor — building an umbrella narrative broad enough to contain all the identities, specific enough not to say nothing to anyone. It's a rare balance. It works when there's a clear common enemy — a territorial problem nobody has solved — that unifies the individual stories under a single sense of urgency.

Managing the local press

The local journalist is a mythological creature: almost no time, too many stories, often a knowledge of the area that surpasses your own. Send them a grey, dull institutional press release and it goes straight in the bin. They can tell it's a press release. As explored in the guide to writing an effective press release, there's only one question to ask yourself before sending anything: "Is this news or an announcement?" The journalist wants the first. Not the second.

The 6-element structure for a press release that actually gets read

1. The headline is already the story — not an announcement. "Candidate presents programme" is not a headline: it's a service notice. "Bus every 20 minutes or public meeting: here's the contract with residents of Rione Cappuccini" is a story.

2. The lead in one sentence — who, what, where, when. No subordinate clauses, no parenthetical asides. The journalist needs to understand the story before reading any further.

3. The central fact — why this matters right now. Not in the abstract: in relation to what the local area is going through at this precise moment.

4. The spoken quote — short, punchy, first person, not bureaucratic. Instead of "we express satisfaction at the approval of the resolution", try: "Today we knocked down a wall of red tape that's been blocking this town for ten years." Feel the physical difference between those two sentences?

5. The context — data, figures, historical comparison. If you cite a statistic, it needs a verifiable source. One made-up figure destroys in five minutes the credibility you've built over five years.

6. The operational close — next event, link, contact details. The journalist needs to know what they can do next.

The difference between Italy and the UK in press management

In the UK, managing the local press is almost a clinical procedure: a dedicated press officer, rigid templates, standardised responses. In Italy — especially in campaigns for mid-sized towns — the press release is written by the candidate themselves at eleven o'clock at night, or by a relative "who's good with computers". The results speak for themselves.

But there's a deeper difference: in Italy, the relationship with the journalist is everything. The press release is often just the opening to a phone conversation or a chat over a coffee. In the UK, the press release is the definitive text — there's no informal negotiation. This means that copy for the Italian press must be written on two levels: one formal (the document) and one relational (the conversation that follows).

Managing criticism, attacks and vulnerabilities

The three types of attack and how to respond to each

Attack on your past: "You were in the majority when X happened." The wrong response is denial. The right response is the reframe: "I was there, and precisely because I saw from the inside what wasn't working, today I have the solutions to genuinely change things." The embarrassing past becomes the qualification for the future.

Attack on your promises: "You already promised this." Distinguish between promises and dependency on third parties. Document what was done, what was outside the control of the local mandate, and what's being proposed differently this time. Above all: pre-empt this objection by writing it into the manifesto before it arrives as an attack.

Personal attack. In small towns where everyone knows everyone, this type of attack travels mainly via WhatsApp, not on posters. Responding publicly amplifies it. The copy response is preventive: build a reputation so solid and consistent that when the attack comes, it sounds out of character with the story you've been telling all along.

Preventive copy as the only alternative to belated reactive crisis management

Every candidate has their own "seafront opening hours" moment: a structural vulnerability that opponents will use. A good copywriter identifies it before the opponents do and builds the narrative to manage it before it becomes an attack. If you know they'll accuse you of lacking administrative experience, write a manifesto that shouts concreteness and data. If they'll attack your years on the council, build the "I know the system from the inside" narrative.

In the UK there's a well-established culture of rapid response: dedicated teams for immediate replies, social media monitoring, counter-narratives ready to go. In Italian local campaigns, this infrastructure simply doesn't exist. The response to an attack often arrives 48 hours later, by which point the news cycle has moved on. Preventive copy is the only available alternative.

The mistakes that sink a campaign

The Catalogue Manifesto: twenty-three absolute priorities equals zero priorities. Those who promise everything aren't credible on anything. Three battles, fought all the way through.

Institutional-speak on social media: "We express satisfaction at the approval of the resolution" on Instagram. That kind of communication drives away even the voters who were already on your side. Social media wants the person, not the press release.

The ungrounded promise: "We'll make this town safer" means nothing without a starting figure, a concrete measure, a timeline. Vague promises activate voter cynicism.

The same copy for every segment: young people in Portici and elderly residents in the council estates are not the same audience. They want different things, speak different languages, use different channels. One-size-fits-all copy is copy for nobody.

Silence in moments of crisis: in an electoral campaign, silence is never neutral. It's read as an admission of guilt. Whoever controls the words first controls the perception of reality.

Conclusion: closing the circle

I'm back on that stage in Portici, twenty years ago. If I could talk to that version of myself standing there with a sixteen-page programme in hand, I'd say just one thing: "Put that paper down. Get off the stage, go in among the people and say just three things — but say them in the words they use when they get home tired after work."

The right words aren't the most beautiful ones. They're the ones that land. The ones the voter feels are their own, even though they didn't write them. The ones that stay in your head while you're waiting for the bus, doing the shopping, drifting off to sleep the night before polling day.

With this article we close our series on the 2026 Local Elections. We've seen how design gives form, how marketing gives direction, how photography gives soul, and how words give life. Four disciplines, one melody. And the melody, never forget, is decided by the lyrics.

On 24 and 25 May 2026, 882 Italian towns and cities go to the polls. In every one of them, someone will have something genuine to say. The challenge — for those standing as candidates and for those helping them communicate — is finding the right words so that message doesn't get swallowed by the noise. One good word, said in the right way at the right moment, can genuinely change the fate of a community.