Snap polls: week 3
A series of mini-blogs covering public opinion, polling and GE 2024
This week started with one television leaders’ debate, finished with another, and was punctuated with several polls and ‘MRPs’. These, including Ipsos’ Political Monitor on Wednesday, continued to show the deep hole the Conservatives are in.
Rishi Sunak kept digging. His decision to leave the D-day commemorations early was described even by his allies as a terrible error of judgement. Party strategists like good optics; this one was as bad as it gets and might yet become totemic.
Unpopularity contest
While Keir Starmer won Tuesday’s debate according to two of the three snapshot polls conducted with viewers immediately after its conclusion, the media were more inclined to score it a draw and, in some quarters, even had it as a Sunak victory.
It was a tough watch. Shouty, nervy and superficial (the format didn’t help), the main ‘attack lines’ were as obvious as they were repetitive; academic Rob Ford summed it up superbly in his post on X:
“Clear plan, clear plan, clear plan.”
“Liz Truss, Liz Truss, Liz Truss.”
“Taxes up £2k, taxes up £2k, taxes up £2k.”
“14 years, 14 years, 14 years.”
Do the TV debates matter? Possibly not for the main largest parties, but they are potentially beneficial for smaller parties who enjoy being in the limelight although 2010’s ‘Cleggmania’ was probably more justifiable as a label describing media attention than public opinion.
Most viewers were probably prone to confirmation bias — seeing what they already believed — but perhaps floating voters can be swayed by what they see (that is, if they are watching, and after Tuesday that’s probably unlikely for the remaining debates).
Debates or no debates, it cannot be overstated how unpopular Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives are. In April — possibly the month the Prime Minister decided to call the election — his net satisfaction score was the joint worst in 50 years of Ipsos’ trends, on a par with John Major and Jeremy Corbyn’s worst ratings.
Ipsos’ latest poll finds no Prime Minister has had worse personal ratings four weeks before election day. The public’s views of his Government’s performance are even worse; just one in eight Britons are satisfied, half the equivalent for Boris Johnson’s Government in 2019.
Keir Starmer is rated more favourably but his stock is short of the relative popularity of election ‘winners’ David Cameron and especially Tony Blair. It is very similar to Ed Miliband’s and inferior to Neil Kinnock’s.
Half say they don’t know what he stands for, something unchanged since February. So far, the campaign is throwing neither heat nor light on the Labour leader and his party, which is probably exactly as strategists want it. If anything, it is his “changed Labour party” and public perceptions of it that are the star of the show.
Triangles and squares
An Ipsos gem — the Political Triangle — was updated this week. Invented by Sir Robert Worcester, it asks voters to rank the extent to which leaders, the parties, or policies most attracted them to a party (survey participants are given 10 points to share between the 3).
The measure has recorded the lowest figure given to the importance of leaders ahead of all the elections going back to 1987, an antidote to the ‘presidentialisation’ of politics in Britain.
Voters gave a mean score of 2.2 out of 10 for leaders, down from 2.7 in 2019 while party identity increased sharply over the same period, up from 2.7 to 3.7 now. This may reflect the less flamboyant nature of Sunak and Starmer compared to Johnson and Corbyn (although Sunak’s original claim to technocracy faded a long time ago).
Another factor could be the shift from Leave/Remain tribalism to something more traditional, plus the importance to the public of purpose (values) and competence (delivery) in the teeth of the omnishambles that Britain feels like to many.
How it started, how it’s going
The Political Triangle has policies as the most important of the three factors, with a mean this year of 4.1. This is down from 2019’s 4.8 although that was historically very high and reflected the dominance of Brexit at that election.
Boris Johnson made the campaign almost exclusively about ‘getting Brexit done’ and this was the most influential issue according to Ipsos. To the very causal observer it might seem incredible that, having got it ‘done’, the Conservatives don’t want to talk about it (nor does Nigel Farage). This is not remotely surprising given the emergence of Bregret, but Labour’s silence possibly is.
The NHS is always a top two issue but has a lead this time rivalling that of 2015. The Conservatives won then but the crisis of confidence in the NHS and other public services has become much more acute, particularly since the pandemic. Ratings of NHS hospitals are down 39 percentage points since 2021, and GPs down 30 points.
Improving the NHS will surely be a focus of the Conservative and Labour party manifestoes and messaging in the coming days and weeks, or will it?
Will Labour’s manifesto be ‘skinny’ and safe (with the risks that brings) or it will it help to close down the “they have no plan” accusation with something substantial?
And will the Conservatives continue to focus on their right flank or, instead, seek to reach into the middle ground in a more expansive, less defensive fashion?
I think we all know what’s coming?
