You are the quarry: the dynamics of an anti-Conservative election

Labour tails are up just now. Or, more precisely, Conservative tails are down. For the last two months, nothing has gone right for the government. Nearly all the wounds have been self-inflicted too. The net result has been that the Conservatives have polled between 30% and 32% in eight of the last 11 polls and Boris Johnson’s personal ratings have plumbed new depths (-48% in the most recent YouGov survey on the subject). Boris Johnson’s name has been chanted derisively on the stands of football stadiums and in darts tournaments. He may be satisfied that there has been no wrongdoing, but he seems to be part of a tiny minority. The appearance of having partied while a pandemic raged was bad enough, but the public really doesn’t take kindly to being told that horse balls are oranges.

The Conservatives have fallen precipitously in the polls: in the first half of October they polled between 38 and 41% in 13 consecutive polls (and only four of those were below 40%). Labour, however, have not profited correspondingly, or not yet anyway. In 23 polls since the beginning of December, Labour have broken 40% only five times.

So, how should we judge what is going on? Is this just mid-term blues? Do Labour have a chance of an overall majority? And what of the Lib Dems, who have now won two spectacular by-election victories in quick succession?

The recent political past

To judge where we go next, we first of all need to understand what has already happened. In order not to make this too long, let’s start at the general election of 2019. That was an election won and lost by two dynamics. First, the Conservatives campaigned on getting Brexit done. This tempted a public weary of interminable arguments and political paralysis and with a crucial segment no longer really caring whether it was a good idea or not so long as it was over. And at least as importantly, the public despised Jeremy Corbyn. Contrary to myth, they didn’t much like Boris Johnson (his personal ratings were unusually poor for a winning party leader) but the repellent Mr Corbyn was enough to bring enough voters into the Conservative column.

Let’s pause for a moment and consider the dynamics here. The first item was a pro-Conservative driver. The second was an anti-Labour driver. To the extent that there were voting blocs constructed around anti-Conservative sentiment, these turned out to be very much second order.

I’d now like you to think about two hypothetical voters. First, imagine yourself a Lib Dem supporter in a Labour/Conservative marginal. The Lib Dems had built their pitch around Brexit, which may or may not be important to you. But if like most members of the general public who weren’t fully signed-up Corbynites you detested Jeremy Corbyn, the idea of tactically voting for Labour was going to be tough. If you weren’t going to vote for the Lib Dems, you might well have preferred the Conservatives over Labour.

Now, imagine yourself a Labour supporter in the prosperous shires round London. Labour might have been obvious no-hopers. But could you bring yourself to vote Lib Dem, who still hadn’t really atoned for their participation in the coalition? If it wasn’t an extremely obvious marginal, probably not.

We move on.

The black swan of the decade then hit: Covid-19. In the short term at least, this really helped Boris Johnson and his government in terms of popularity. Both benefited from a “rally round the flag” effect in the initial crisis. The spell was partially but not fully broken by Dominic Cummings’ voyage of the damned to county Durham and Barnard Castle. Labour clawed their way back to parity with the Conservatives by the end of the year. Then the government got another polling boost at an unusual moment in the polling cycle courtesy of the successful rollout of the vaccines. From the end of January to early September, the Conservatives led in every published poll (as one prominent academic monotonously pointed out: he has since fallen silent on the subject).

Beneath the surface, however, things were moving. Since May, Boris Johnson’s personal ratings have been in steady and steep decline. His current dire favourability ratings did not come from nowhere. The air has been coming out of the balloon for a long time. Labour took over the lead in the polls in mid-November. If you had not been following the news and you had only seen the trend in the polls, that would not have come as a surprise.

So, let’s recap. We have a Prime Minister who was never particularly popular, who has enjoyed popularity only for periods when external matters acted for his benefit and who has been steadily dissipating that good fortune for a long time. This Parliament has been like no other, in that the normal thrum of the cycle has been completely disrupted. That period of disruption seems to be drawing to a close in polling terms.

And there is an added consideration. It appears that there has been a rapprochement on the left. As Mike Smithson has noted, both Labour and Lib Dem voters appear more willing to vote tactically than previously. When you stand back and think about it, that’s unsurprising. Jeremy Corbyn has been banished, making Labour a proposition that many more Lib Dems can consider. And the Lib Dems are if anything more opposed to the Conservatives than Labour are, making the prospect of a repeat of the coalition implausible and again tempting Labour voters to lend their votes to the Lib Dems. All we might be seeing here is a reversion to the mean.

Where do we go from here?

Prime Minister

Let’s start at the top. Boris Johnson looks doomed. To put it in terms that those darts fans who were jeering him would recognise, for him to retrieve his personal polling from here would be the best comeback since Lazarus. Given that the fall in his personal ratings has been driven by the public’s perception of his character, that’s a very tough challenge. Indeed, there’s no particular reason to assume that the decline in his popularity has bottomed out. It’s quite possible that some voters are still absorbing the impact of recent news in their political calculations. Not everyone is gripped by political Twitter.

Boris Johnson has advantages of incumbency but it’s easy for Conservative MPs to oust him if they want to and given his recent performance levels they have absolutely no reason not to want to. He was brought in to get them re-elected, which he managed. To repeat that, however, depends on him keeping the Conservative party popular, which he isn’t doing now. There is no cohort of Johnsonite MPs to shield him. Unlike Theresa May and John Major, he doesn’t occupy the midpoint between competing blocs of MPs making them wary of risking removing him. He inspires no loyalty in MPs, unsurprisingly given that he has shown them none either.

Some commentators have suggested that it’s recoverable if Boris Johnson keeps his head down and has a quiet spell of capable administration. But Boris Johnson is not the type to keep his head down. On the day of the North Shropshire by-election, he popped up to give a tin-eared response, apparently blaming the media and voters for not focusing on his record rather than what he evidently considered trivia. It was an avoidable blunder. He hasn’t learned that if you can’t improve on silence, say nothing.

I don’t expect him to learn that, so I expect that if his polling remains poor or worsens (and why wouldn’t it, given we’re in for a wretched period with omicron, stagflation and NI rises to come?), he will be removed by MPs at a convenient moment. He may struggle on for a fair while, perhaps till June or so, to be used as a scapegoat for a series of difficult decisions on which his successor can have clean hands. But right now, he looks done.

The Conservatives’ challenge

Whoever leads the Conservatives into the next election, they have their work cut out to repeat their victory in 2019. To assemble the same coalition of voters, they need to find a positive message to attract the Leave bloc and to find a negative message about Labour that will prove as effective at repelling voters as Jeremy Corbyn was. Both halves of this look tricky. Having promised to get Brexit done last time, they can’t use the same slogan this time without tacitly admitting that Brexit wasn’t done. While Sir Keir Starmer hasn’t set the Thames on fire, nor does he frighten the horses. His team has for much of the time looked insipid, but as an attack line that’s not brilliant (and in any case, there are recent signs of improvement, particularly from Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting, who have both been energetic in their roles).

The Conservatives might instead seek to build a different coalition. So far, they haven’t really come up with anything obvious.

Labour’s challenge

Labour can’t feel too comfortable. The public, when polled, still don’t think Labour are ready to govern and they still on balance trust the Conservatives more with the economy. They need to change those impressions if they are to expect to form the next government. A lot of the Conservatives’ poor polling derives from their 2019 supporters now having drifted to “Don’t Know” (that grouping forms something like 8% of the electorate all by itself). Few are yet naming Labour. There is definitely a substantial part of current polling that looks like conventional mid-term blues for the party of government.

The coming years look challenging. The costs of the pandemic need to be paid for and the economy looks to be shaky. But Labour may well find themselves facing a new Prime Minister, with the initial goodwill that a fair-minded public always gives to a new leader. If that new leader can make the election about Labour’s inadequacies (“they’re just not up to it” is a message that Labour remain currently very vulnerable to), in the manner that Gordon Brown was able with partial success to make the 2010 election about the Conservatives’ callowness, the Conservatives could yet rebound.

Labour cannot assume that the current anger with the government will translate into support at the next election. They need to be working on their own prospectus to the country.

Dynamics of the next election

So the first question for the next election is whether it will be more about the Tories’ arrogance and entitlement or more about Labour’s lack of experience. The answer to that question remains unclear to me.

As things stand, it seems unlikely that the next election is going to be as focused on public perceptions of Labour as the last one, and likely that it is going to be much more focused on public perceptions of the Conservative party. Both of those things are good news for Labour (and the Lib Dems). It means that Labour and the Lib Dems look set to benefit from more tactical voting by centre ground voters.

The importance of this is often underrated and I’m sceptical whether it’s properly captured in the seat predictors that everyone feverishly uses the moment a new poll is out. At the 2019 election, if half of the Lib Dem voters in Labour/Conservative marginals had voted for Labour instead, Labour would have taken 16 more seats. If half of the Labour voters in Conservative/Lib Dem marginals had voted for the Lib Dems instead, the Lib Dems would have taken 8 more seats. In other words, the Conservative majority would have been cut by more than half, without any swing anywhere else.

This, of course, takes no account of those centre ground voters who voted for the Conservatives in order to keep Jeremy Corbyn out. This particular tranche of voters will need to be thought about carefully by all parties. Far too many commentators, beguiled by polling taken in unrepresentative times, have overlooked the potential difficulty that the Conservatives will have retaining all of these voters when the stimulus that led to them voting for the Conservatives has disappeared. Sir Keir Starmer is hard to present as a bogeyman.

No two elections are ever alike, but dynamics of the next election may well have some resemblances to the dynamics of 1997. At the previous election, the Conservatives successfully made the election about Labour’s (and specifically its leader’s) inadequacies, frightening centre ground voters into voting for them. In 1997, the election was about Conservative inadequacies, leading the centre ground voters to vote against them.

This led to both Labour and the Lib Dems overperforming in seat counts relative to uniform national swing, as voters worked to punish the Conservatives. The Lib Dems actually declined in vote share between 1992 and 1997, but rose from 18 to 46 seats. The Conservatives underperformed uniform national swing by 42 seats.

(If I were the Conservatives, I’d fret a lot about the Lib Dems’ electoral machine. It’s apparent from both Chesham & Amersham and North Shropshire that their by-election operation is highly effective. They won’t be fighting all that many seats in a general election, so they’ll be treating the ones they do fight as if they were a series of by-elections. If voters don’t fear Labour, and they don’t seem to at present, they won’t be afraid to vote for the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems have underperformed at four successive elections, and I’ve made a lot of money betting on them doing so. Next time I expect to be betting on them overperforming.)

I’m not expecting the Conservatives to collapse to 1997 levels, but the dynamics of an election that’s about the Conservatives are very different from one that’s about Labour. Crudely, in political terms you want the election to be about your opponents. For example, the 2016 US election was ultimately focused on Hillary Clinton, who lost. Donald Trump’s flaws were less dwelt-upon in the final stages of that election. The 2020 US election was focused on Donald Trump, who lost. Joe Biden allowed himself to remain a blank canvas. Labour lost in 2015 because Ed Miliband was perceived to be potentially too beholden to Alex Salmond. And so on.

The Conservatives can still win an election that is more about them, even if that causes their opponents to be more organised in how they vote against them, but to do so they will need to gather sufficient vote share to defeat that organisation. If they tally 40%, it probably won’t matter how organised Labour and Lib Dem voters are. If they get 31%, the Conservatives would probably be hammered badly, no matter what the exact vote shares of Labour and the Lib Dems are.

There is a crossover point, but it’s hard to pinpoint. Given how the Conservatives have burned their bridges with other parties, it’s hard to see how they could retain power with fewer than 310 seats, and even if they get that many seats they would need the DUP to play ball, which is most uncertain right now. In an election with that dynamic, I suggest that the Conservatives should not expect to retain power if they tally 37% or less. As a point of reference, the Conservatives got an overall majority with 37% in 2015.

So if I were advising the Conservatives, I’d be looking to find a much better attack line against Labour and use it relentlessly. They need to keep centre ground voters concerned about Labour. Right now, while they don’t rate Labour, they don’t hate them.

Things I haven’t talked about

The observant will note that I have at no point talked about red walls or blue walls. There’s a reason for this: I regard both as distractions. If the Conservatives poll 45% at the next election, they will win another landslide. If the Conservatives poll 30%, they will lose by a landslide. Exactly which seats are in play in either permutation is not really that important. Of course there is demographic change, as some seats trend to the Conservatives and some trend away from them (as if demographic change is anything new!). And of course there is some overlap between those demographic trends and Brexit, though by and large the trends are far more longstanding than that, and Brexit was as much a consequence as a cause.

There’s also a danger of ecological fallacies at work. Conservative voters in the red wall generally look quite like Conservative voters elsewhere: typically older homeowners who’ve done alright for themselves. The Conservatives have long held loads of seats in Essex and Kent thanks to this type of voter. Similarly, Lib Dem and Labour voters in the Home Counties look like the urban professionals that you find in London who are progressive voters, and that’s not particularly surprising because a lot of them were progressive urban professionals in London till they moved out.

Finally, so far as I’m aware there has been no work done on whether the population movements prompted by the pandemic have halted current demographic trends in their tracks or accelerated them. That seems rather important to me.

Both main parties should worry a lot less about exactly where their voters are and do more to gain and retain more of them. By and large, the where question will sort itself out naturally from that.

Summary

It would be nice to be able to make some grand prediction. Boringly, however, I really do see this as all to play for at this stage. If things don’t change, the Conservatives are heading for defeat. However, as the party of government they have the unrivalled ability to take the initiative and set the terms of debate. They aren’t taking it yet, but they have quite a bit of time to do so. Assuming they choose a new leader in the short to medium term, the next election looks very finely poised indeed.