Party reputations are an essential feature of party competition. Earlier scholarship identifies parties’ connections to social groups as an important constituent component of party reputations, and tends to see party reputations as stable in the short run. We challenge this view, arguing that group appeals, i.e. valenced references to social groups, can in fact lead to short-run changes in party-group linkages. Using an automated approach, we measure group appeals in party speech in Britain over 3 decades and link it to survey data. We find that citizens keep ‘running tallies’ of group appeals and frequently update perceptions of their group linkages in response to group appeals by party elites.