Polls point to Conservative victory, but PM mustn’t count his chickens

This is beginning to look like an election the Conservatives should not lose. The party has gradually squeezed the life out of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. As many as two thirds of those who voted Leave are now backing Boris Johnson and his Brexit deal. That has given the party a double-digit lead in the polls that, if it transpires in the ballot boxes, should be sufficient to give the Prime Minister a comfortable overall majority.

So, what could possibly go wrong? There are three reasons why the Conservatives cannot as yet assume they are home and dry.

First, the party still enjoys the support of nearly one in five of those who voted Remain in 2016. Without them, the Conservative lead in the polls would disappear. Yet, in focusing on “get Brexit done” Mr Johnson has said little that seems likely to help keep them on board.

Tory support among this group has held steady during the campaign – though there has been no sign of any marked increase, unlike the position among Leave supporters. Many Tory Remainers are traditional pro-business Conservatives whose support for the party would not usually be in doubt.

And the radical agenda put forward by Jeremy Corbyn last week will doubtless do little to attract them.

Nevertheless, the polls suggest that, since the last election, more than one in five Tory Remainers have switched to the Liberal Democrats – and that that proportion could be much higher in some of the pro-Remain seats the

Lib Dems are targeting in London. As a result, Tory support is still down on 2017 among Remain voters. Mr Johnson cannot afford for his support to fall much further among this group.

Second, Labour has not given up on trying to win back some of the Leave voters who supported the party in 2017. Mr Corbyn’s personal neutrality on Brexit and the party’s manifesto are both designed in part to try to achieve that. Much of the party’s domestic policy programme, such as the nationalisation of the utilities, and putting employee representatives on company boards, has been shown by both ComRes and YouGov to be relatively popular with voters, including those who voted Leave.

ComRes, for example, found that 45 per cent of Leave voters supported nationalising the utilities, together with Royal Mail and BT’s broadband business. Just 30 per cent are opposed. Mr Johnson has to trust that some of those former Labour voters whose support for Brexit reflected economic discontent are not attracted by their former party’s willingness to rewrite the rule book of the economy.

Third, Mr Johnson’s prospects rest heavily on a continuation of the partisan division in the ranks of Remain voters. On average in the polls, the level of support for all of those parties in favour of a second referendum is slightly above that for parties in favour of Brexit. However, whereas Mr Johnson has the support of around two thirds of Leavers, Mr Corbyn is backed by only slightly more than two fifths of Remainers.

The Conservatives’ seemingly comfortable poll lead would soon be reduced if the Remain vote were to coalesce behind Labour, rather than be split between Mr Corbyn’s party and the Lib Dems (who still have just under 30 per cent of the Remain vote). Labour have had some success in that direction; there has been as much as a seven-point swing from the Lib Dems to Labour since the election was called. Only the Conservative success in squeezing the Brexit Party vote has ensured that this swing to Labour has not eroded Mr Johnson’s lead.

In any event, even if Remain support continues to be divided across the country as a whole, it might still coalesce locally if Remain voters decide to vote tactically for whichever party seems best able to defeat the Conservatives in their constituency. Here, there was a warning signal from Ipsos MORI last week.

It reported that, at 14 per cent, the proportion of people saying they were voting tactically was three points up on the same stage in the last election. Moreover, it was twice as high among those who voted Labour or Lib Dem in 2017 as it was among those who voted Conservative.

A glance at what happened in the 1997 election, when opposition voters were especially keen to boot the Tories out, illustrates the risk. In many seats, 3 per cent voted tactically for whichever party was best able to defeat the Conservatives locally. If that happened now it could cost the Conservatives up to 20 seats – more than Mr Johnson can safely afford.

‘Tory support is down on 2017 among Remain voters. Mr Johnson cannot afford for it to fall much further’

Sir John Curtice is a professor of politics at Strathclyde University and a senior research fellow at NatCen Social Research and The UK in a Changing Europe.