General Election Week 5 – Poll watch

In some ways the polls are all over the shop, and yet in other ways they are beginning to coalesce. But first off, they are now moving at least, just not quite how everyone expected.

Moving polls

History shows us that usually the polls narrow during the actual campaign and typically towards the end of it. But if one takes a look at the Labour poll lead over the Tories, it’s been pretty much static. However, if we get under the bonnet of the numbers a little more, we can see the polls have moved around quite a bit. The leader, Labour, has drooped by around three points, which is fairly normal. But the Tories have slipped by four points. Normally the leader goes down and the underdog goes up, so that’s unusual but not perhaps unexpected in the situation the Tories find themselves. Who has benefitted? Principally Reform with the Lib Dems moving up a couple of points too but still below where they usually end up in General Elections. The net result? Labour’s poll lead of around 21 points hasn’t budged.

But the political parties have in fact moved around by seven points, which is significant. And with Labour needing to be 12.5 points ahead in the polls to achieve a one seat majority, in a normal election, this would have meant that potentially the polls by now would have moved uncomfortably closer to that number for Labour. The late rise of Reform is screwing with polling normality.

Erratic polls

But something else is going on too. The polls have been somewhat erratic. On the same day this past week two pollsters gave the Labour lead at 21 points whilst predicted it as only 11 points. On another day, two MRP polls, the alleged but controversial new gold standard, told us that Reform would win zero seats and also 30 seats. You read that right: 30 seats! In Clacton alone, they told us that Farage wouldn’t win and at the same time would not only win but achieve the largest ever swing in UK election history. That’s just weird and way outside any standard margin of error.

Herding

We are also perhaps seeing the signs of pollster ‘herding’, where the pollsters play with their models to end up at the overall average so they can’t be more wrong than their competitors on election day. The current poll of polls average is a Labour lead of 21 points. The group of pollsters that have been above the poll of polls average have moved from 25 at the start of the campaign to now 22. Those that were below the poll of polls average have moved from a 16 point Labour lead (and they even had some early polls at 12-14 points previously) up to an average of a 19 point lead. Hmmm…slightly suspicious. Watch this space. Of course, this could just be the unusually large percentage of ‘don’t knows’ finally reporting they’ve made their minds up. But anecdotal reports from all parties’ ground campaigns show that the percentage of ‘don’t knows’ is still very high, around 25% or more.

Difficult polling history

The 2015 election result was not what the pollsters had predicted; Cameron won a majority. It was a shock to the whole polling industry which reacted by engaging a team of outside experts to look at what went wrong. In the end, the pollsters made the changes recommended by the inquiry, plus others of their own covering sampling, questioning and weighting approaches. As it turned out, at the following 2017 General Election, had they not done this and instead carried on doing exactly as they had been in 2015, then the 2017 polls would have been more accurate! Go figure.

As we keep saying, polling is a black art not an exact science. Let’s see where we end up.

General Election Week 5 – The ‘cut throughs’

So what cut through to ‘Whitby Woman’ this week in the election media coverage?

We’ve had an endless slew of big polls predicting various huge Tory losses. Inflation dropped to 2%, but did anyone notice? One pollster, Ipsos, predicted a huge Farage win in Clacton. And all over this last weekend we had the mainstream media gorging on either (a) Farage’s latest exposing gaffe when he said Putin was given the excuse to invade Ukraine because of NATO’s eastwards expansion or (b) Farage merely restating some mainstream geopolitical analysts’ viewpoint, take your pick! And then there is of course the ‘gate’ that seemingly hasn’t yet been allocated ‘gate’ status for some reason: ‘election betting-gate’, perhaps?

So it’s mostly been Farage, Farage, Farage really, as the mainstream media cannot help themselves but shout about their favourite political hate figure. There is of course an interesting point here, as one Telegraph journalist put it recently:

“Farage is by far and away the best orator and debater around and says, sometimes, what huge numbers of us think. In a politically stagnant age, of the crushingly dull Starmer and the ‘rabbit in the headlights’ Sunak, Farage adds much colour to the hustings and would certainly do so to the House of Commons.” 

Anyway, the runner up for that news item that Whitby Woman will probably still remember by polling day is the endless poll misery for the Tories. But therein lies a question: are the pollsters actually affecting voter behaviour rather than just reporting it? Does the endless drip drip of bad poll news for the Tories actually help depress their vote? Or will voters, as indeed with Cameron’s win in 2015 and the Brexit vote in 2016, deliver a rather better result for the Tories than the doomster pollsters have been predicting?

The outright winner is of course ‘election betting-gate’. Do you know anyone who bothers to bet on such things? No, nor do we. As the Matt cartoon in The Telegraph recently put it: “I’m your Tory candidate. I bet you a tenner you’re not going to vote for me!”

General Election Week 4 – Where are we at?

The main parties’ election strategies have now become nakedly clear and can be summarised as follows:

Tories – They have switched from a pre-Farage ‘core vote’ strategy to a post-Farage entry to the election race ‘begging for mercy’ strategy, as evidenced by Grant Shapps’ desperate pleas in media interviews to “not give Labour a supermajority”, a concept that doesn’t exist in British politics but roughly translates as ‘please don’t kill us stone dead’.

Labour – Their approach has been defined as the ‘Ming vase strategy’, carefully tiptoeing the fragile empty vessel of their agenda through the campaign hoping no one either notices or even worse actually takes a serious look inside to see how empty it is in reality. So far the media are playing along.

Lib Dems – The plan here is to keep the photo ops coming, in the hope they at least achieve some media attention.

Reform – Their strategy is…how would Sir Humphrey put it…’very ambitious, Minister’! In essence they want to kill the Tory Party so that they can assume their ‘new natural position’ as the main party on the Right. Perhaps Noisy Nigel even actually believes this. But in all likelihood, as the media now pores over/ridicules their agenda in glorious detail after their manifesto launch, their early campaign surge might rather tail off as time rumbles on, much as Cleggmania caused a huge opinion poll spike but then somewhat subsided before polling day in 2010.

SNP – Blame the English, blame Westminster, blame the Tories. Same old, same old.

Fake numbers

We also have the usual fake economic fear mongering (aka lies). The Tories have used their ‘special calculator’ to explain that Labour would take (invent number here) pounds out of our pay packets in extra taxes. Not to be outdone, Labour have exceeded themselves by creating a fantastically unbelievable amount (literally pluck a big number out of nowhere here) that our mortgages would rise should the Tories win, both of which seem very unlikely indeed. To remind, we all played this game during Brexit: Remain’s 800k job losses that turned out to actually be 500k new jobs created, versus Leave’s £350m EU spend redirected at the NHS on every bus that hasn’t actually materialised.

Harry Kane wins

The reality is that the media agenda is now going to be swamped with Euro footie, so the election campaign might struggle for airtime all day every day. Particularly so if England get through the knockout stage and get to the final or…holds breath…actually win the dammed thing. Standby for lots of photo ops of all our politicos, England shirt on, beer in hand, pretending to be lifelong footie fans. (‘Remind me, this is the one with the round balls, right?’) For sure Ed Davey’s already got a whole range of pre-shot footie photos covering every possible outcome.

What gives?

It seems to the REC team that both main political parties are staring down the barrels of a very difficult immediate future. For the Tories, the aftermath of the shellacking they are likely to sustain on 4 July is going to be significant, if not life changing. Will the inevitable post-election leadership battle lead to the left or the right of the party holding the leadership? If it’s the right, will they make an accommodation with Reform and Noisy Nigel? And what does an ‘accommodation’ actually look like? If it’s the left in control, will the right split off and join Reform? If not, will there be room for a third centre right party, a sort of new Change UK, remember them?

Two things to remember here: the Tory Party has been very adept many times over at respawning after serious defeats; they are the past masters at this game and tend to bounce back surprisingly efficiently. The second point is one our esteemed MD makes regularly: whatever happens, UK voters are a rather conservative (small c) bunch and broadly speaking there are around 40% of votes up for grabs however the centre Right wants to organise itself.

For Labour the challenges are different but also very serious. They are likely to come to power with a significant large majority now. (If they don’t after the Tory collapse and such a solid poll lead, then this will present a surprising and unwelcome challenge of an entirely different complexion!) On the face of it, this may sound like a good scenario, but the problem is that expectations will be absolutely crazily high and completely unrealistic. Moreover, the polls will likely rise after the election, the so-called poll bounce. (Ask Rishi Sunak about this; he was not long ago the equivalent of a political Jesus when he was dolling out all that furlough money, polling as the most popular politician in the western world. Ah…good times, good times).

But after the rise comes the fall. The day after the election, all the same problems still exist: taxes and debt at historic highs, public services still performing poorly, immigration (both legal and illegal) still soaring, the NHS still demanding billions more in cash to ‘save itself’ on an annual basis, doctors’ strikes to solve, on and on the list goes. And all these problems are tough, but those expectations will remain crazily high, drunk on that election victory.

Blair had the same problem in 1997 but he had two key factors that saved him: first, he had those nice multiple year Tory tax surpluses gifted to him by Ken Clarke which meant he could hurl cash at the public sector to effect some change and pay off his tribal public sector vote. Second, he was personally popular, in that voters had switched and voted for him because they liked what he said and stood for. That is very much not the case for poor old Captain Flip Flop. Sir Keir finds himself in an awkward position. In around two weeks, he is poised to become the least popular candidate ever elected to be PM but, bizarrely, also the one with potentially the largest Parliamentary majority in history, according to the polls right now. Voters haven’t taken to him and Labour will win by default just because the electorate dislikes the Tories more.

But it get’s worse. On matters foreign policy, St Tony of Blair was able to engage with like-minded ‘third way’ progressives in Clinton, Schroeder etc. As an important and loud voice within the EU, he was able to hold sway, be taken seriously, be at the centre of things internationally. Starmer is going to be dealing with Trump (most likely right now), Meloni (the lead voice in the EU currently), von der Lyon (who has moved Right to win friends with the new hard Right parties storming EU member states’ governments), maybe even Le Pen in due course. He will (a) not be among friends and (b) no longer be a big EU voice but an outsider that many EU governments still want to keep shafting.

Starmer is going to have a much harder time than Blair. And with a volatile electorate, swinging wildly between giving Boris a landslide and then Starmer a big win all within five years, that position will quite quickly be a tough one and rapid unpopularity is not altogether unlikely.