Full Breakdown
Guess the Party: A Viral Game Exposes the Limits of Visual Cues in Identifying Local Election Candidates
5/8/2026, 9:28:26 PM
Guess the Party Game Engages Hundreds of Thousands in Identifying Candidates by Photo
Sam Hamill-Stewart launched “Guess the Party,” an online quiz that presents photographs of local election candidates and asks players to select the party they represent. The game was circulated among Westminster staff and party activists on a Thursday, with participants submitting their choices until polls closed that evening. By the close of voting, the platform had recorded a substantial volume of responses, indicating broad engagement with the exercise.
Development and Distribution of the Game
Hamill-Stewart sourced candidate photographs from the civic-technology organization Democracy Club. To prevent obvious visual cues, he removed any images that displayed a party logo in the background before uploading them to the quiz. This preparation aimed to ensure that participants relied on personal appearance rather than explicit branding when making their selections.
Notable Candidates and Their Identification Rates
Jacky Carr, a freelance theatre producer standing in Broxborne as a Green candidate, was identified correctly by 91.3 % of players. Alan John Outlaw, the Reform candidate for Keighley East, achieved an 80.7 % correct-guess rate. In contrast, Green candidate Martin Radbon of Erith was correctly identified by only 1.7 % of participants, most of whom assumed he represented Reform. Conservative candidate Laura Caroline Harrison, distinguished by purple hair, was recognized as a Tory by just 2.5 % of players, with many attributing her to the Greens. Among the top five candidates misidentified as Greens, four displayed pink, red or purple hair while belonging to other parties.
Overall Accuracy Across Parties
Across all participants, Green candidates were correctly identified 37.5 % of the time, the highest rate among parties. Reform candidates followed with a 35.4 % correct-guess proportion. Liberal Democrat candidates proved most difficult, with only 15.2 % of guesses matching their actual affiliation. By the poll-closing moment, the quiz had logged 3.9 million individual guesses submitted by roughly 134 000 players, illustrating the scale of engagement and the variability of visual inference.
Implications for Political Branding and Voter Perception
The game’s findings demonstrate that commonly assumed visual markers—such as a red tie for Labour or colourful hair for the Greens—do not reliably indicate party affiliation. High misidentification rates for candidates with distinctive hair colours suggest that reliance on appearance can lead to inaccurate assumptions about political alignment. Consequently, the results raise questions about the effectiveness of visual branding strategies employed by parties and underscore the potential for voter misperception when superficial cues are emphasized.
Official Statements and Observations from the Game’s Creator
Hamill-Stewart noted that visual cues such as a red tie can serve as a “red herring,” emphasizing that appearance alone does not guarantee accurate party identification. His decision to strip logos from the images reflects an intention to test participants’ reliance on non-branding attributes. The creator’s observations, derived from the game’s aggregated results, highlight the limited diagnostic value of superficial traits in political identification.
