Why it may come down to underdogs v bandwagons
IBRIEFLY contemplated offering this column to one of the major political parties, all of which have sunk to the depths of creating sham editions of local newspapers, stuffing them with great news about their candidates, and delivering them as ‘free sheets’ – like the Conservatives’ Birmingham Northfield Future.
However, with the planned column rather dependent on the Post, which also stands more chance of still being around next week, loyalty prevailed.
One of many things we who lecture and write about elections have to force ourselves to remember is that, unlike us, most potential voters don’t spend much of their time thinking about political stuff.
Most of us have known for weeks, some for decades, how we’ll vote on Thursday. But we also know from previous post-election polls that we’re the odd ones out.
This Brexit-dominated election may be exceptional, but usually only around 60 per cent of eventual voters report having decided how they would vote before the campaign started.
A quarter tend to decide during the campaign, and up to a fifth during the last week or on election day itself.
The truth is that even this historyshaping election isn’t as big a deal for them as for candidates, campaigners, activists, door-knockers, and needy broadcasters.
Pollsters obviously know this. Which is why for years they resisted translating their final poll percentages into Commons seats and thereby predicting the next PM and Government.
Final polls themselves were tricky enough, and regularly some way adrift of the votes actually cast – as I well recall from the first General Election I covered for the Post in 1992 (then a daily broadsheet, so more space for columnists!).
I’d explained these things in my campaign columns, and how there were two contrasting ‘late decider’ effects – opposite ways in which even final polls could miss any late opinion swing created by those election day deciders, and thereby appear to have made a wrong prediction of the winners.
A bandwagon effect would be late deciders disproportionately backing the party obviously ahead in the polls, perhaps to be part of the winning team. An underdog effect would be their sympathising with the apparently trailing party, or wanting to prevent the leading party getting too large a majority.
The eight pre-1992 elections had produced three bandwagons (1964, 1979, 1987) and five underdogs (1966, 1970, both 1974s, and 1983) – hardly conclusive, but interesting.
This time, the Conservatives had been in government since 1979, Thatcher had gone, succeeded by the charisma-lite John Major, but her unloved poll tax, though deathsentenced, lingered on.
Of the 50 campaign polls, 39 had put Labour ahead, including 11 of the final 14. Just two of the 50 had had the Conservatives more than three per cent ahead. Labour leader Neil Kinnock was almost cockily confident – and the large-circulation ‘red top’ tabloid press duly laid into him.
Whatever the cause, the scale of the ensuing pro-Conservative underdog effect was such that Labour, Kinnock and the whole political polling industry got a massive kicking – or even, extending the canine metaphor, a mastiff kicking.
With more votes cast than in the 2016 EU Referendum – contrary to persistent Leaver claims that their vote was some kind of record – the Conservatives in 1992 actually achieved a 7.5 per cent vote lead, 336 MPs to Labour’s 271, and John Major remained PM for another five years.
This time, the Conservative lead in the polls is obviously much larger than Labour’s in 1992.
But it needs to be, because, for Brexit purposes, Conservative MPs must outnumber not just Labour, but Labour plus probably all other parliamentary parties.
And it is these other parties’ particularly younger supporters who are likely to be disproportionately represented among those telling pollsters they have still to decide.
And, to quote the estimable Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that. Because, while staying on the topic of public opinion, I want to turn to something qualitatively altogether different: a set of survey findings that I’ll recall long after most of the rest have become a blur.
Published in late October, it was the latest in an annual series of large-scale surveys commissioned by senior academics at Edinburgh and Cardiff universities. Entitled ‘Future of England Surveys’, they actually comprise co-ordinated large-scale YouGov surveys in England, Scotland and Wales, focusing initially on particularly English electors’ views about Scottish and Welsh devolution and recently on the impact of Brexit and a potential second Scottish independence referendum.
Both the findings of especially the past two surveys and their increasingly hostile reception have been alarming, with a noticeable readiness in parts of the media to attack not just the message but the messengers.
The question generating greatest hostility this year was whether a series of potential consequences of leaving or remaining in the EU were seen “as a risk, but one worth taking”.
Break-up of the UK? UK getting substantially poorer? Me getting substantially poorer? The party I support breaking apart? Protests in which members of the public are badly injured? Violence directed towards MPs?
For 70 per cent or more Leavers all of these and more would be worth it. For 60 per cent or more Remainers the last three, plus others, would be.
Whatever the politicians say, it’s become increasingly hard to see how as a nation we can win anything with divisions on that scale.
Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of
Birmingham
The scale of the ensuing proConservative underdog effect was such that Labour, Kinnock and the whole political polling industry got a massive kicking