UK Election: Labour and Tory Campaigns' Internal Polling Seems to Be Consistent with Public Polling
July 2, 2024
What we are seeing in the UK election today is what campaigns do with polling data - and how we can tell whether or not to believe a campaign’s rhetoric. Labour leader, and likely the next PM, Keir Starmer is campaigning in the Tory heartland in the south of England. He apparently will be campaigning in former Tory PM and current Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s constituency. The fact that the Home Counties1 are where Labour is focusing its energy in the last few days of the campaign tells us that the party believes it has the northern Red Wall,2 which it lost in 2019, sewn up. Starmer is now turning to seats where he thinks Labour can make additional gains towards a supermajority.
Current Tory PM Rishi Sunak is also campaigning in the Home Counties this week in an apparent effort to prevent a total blowout on Thursday. That the campaign is ending in Tory strongholds indicates the public polling in this election is consistent with each party’s internal polling. Of course, they could all be wrong (we’ll find out Thursday night). Compare this to the 2016 election in the US. The public polling in the final two weeks of the campaign told us that the election was going to be very close in Democratic Blue Wall3 states. Yet, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton campaigned in Arizona - a seat that until that time had voted for a Democrat only one time since 1948.4
The 2016 election predated this newsletter, but I did write then in a different forum about how Clinton’s behavior tells us their internal polling is telling them something different than the public polling. It turned out not to be true - Clinton had stopped polling in Wisconsin and Michigan. But the Clinton campaign is the exception that proves the rule. Regardless of whatever rhetoric they are using to frame the narrative, campaigns use polling to direct resources in what they believe are the most efficient ways to accomplish the best results.
This is what is happening in the UK this week. The internal polling of both parties is telling them the seats most likely to be persuadable are in Tory territory. For Labour, campaigning there is about increasing its majority so it can more comfortably govern without fear of losing seats in by-elections. For the Conservatives, this is about preventing Labour from doing this and preventing the possibility of finishing third.
Sunak appears to be having trouble delivering a consistent message. At times he maintains that the Tories are in this to win and at other times he is pleading with voters to not give Labour a supermajority (which suggest thes Tories are, in fact, nowhere near winning). In the past 24 hours he has gone from arguing that Labour has no defense strategy and that Putin wants a Labour victory to suggesting (through surrogates) that Starmer doesn’t want to put in a full day’s work because Starmer said in a Times interview this morning that he would like to spend Friday nights with his children when possible. It smells of desperation.
The Conservative Party knows it is going to lose, but there is increasing anxiety that it will be left rudderless on Friday as it is possible the election will wipe out most or all likely future leaders - including Sunak. Some in the party are concerned that the weeks following the election will be filled with nasty infighting and finger pointing without any serious leader to guide them through it. Perhaps sensing this kind of a future for his party, Lord Harris of Peckam - a long-time Tory donor and supporter of education policy - defected to Labour claiming the Conservatives no longer put students first. He says the party is out of ideas.
“At this election it is no longer the Conservatives who are the party of high and rising standards, no longer the Conservatives putting our children and their schools front and centre. Despite a merry-go-round of ministers in recent years, they are out of ideas.”
Lord Harris on his defection to the Labour Party
If the Tories get so wiped out they finish third, who finishes second? The polling suggest it will be the neo-fascist5 Reform Party (formerly Brexit Party, formerly UKIP), but many seem to think it will be the Liberal Democrats - UK’s historically third-largest party,6 which was a partner in the Tory government led by Cameron. Reform has about 17% to Lib Dems 11%, so Nigel Farage’s party has a significant lead in support.7 So, how could the Lib Dems be a threat for third place, let alone second?
It has to do with where the votes are and the differing sizes of constituencies.8 The Times reports that about one in five voters who supported the Tories in 2019 are going for Reform. This means a lot of Reform support is coming directly - not just ideologically - from the Conservatives. It is likely that a lot of their vote will be split with Conservatives across the same districts, some of which may end up being won by the Lib Dem candidate while Reform’s support is spread too thin to win more than a few constituencies.
“I am in no doubt that the party and its senior leadership are not racist. However, as the vast majority of candidates are indeed racist, misogynistic, and bigoted, I do not wish to be directly associated with people who hold such views that are so vastly opposing to my own and what I stand for.”
Georgie David, candidate for West Ham and Beckton, upon defecting from the Reform Party to the Conservative Party – the second Reform candidate to do so this week.
Ed Davey, the Lib Dems leader, is both confident and anxious. Davey thinks the party could have a very successful night by winning 40-45 seats, but more and more pundits are saying they could win 70-80 seats. Davey is concerned that they could win 50 or 55 seats, but it be viewed as an underperformance because of the expectations set by these pundits. The safe money seems to be on the Tories finishing second leaving the Lib Dems a close third and Reform, having won a lot of votes but few seats, whining about a rigged system.9
These are the counties around Greater London that usually vote Tory.
Reminder: in the UK the color red is used for Labour and blue for Conservatives. The color scheme is typical across Europe (and pretty much everywhere, I believe): red for the center-left to left and blue for center-right to right. The US uses the reverse, and it is based on what TV networks used on election nights. There is probably a reason why, and I would not be surprised if it’s just “because we do things differently here.” But I don’t know.
See note 2.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton narrowly beat Republican Bob Dole while Independent Ross Perot took 8% of the vote in Arizona.
I call Reform neo-fascist because this is the latest vehicle for Farage, who has been arguing for extreme nationalism in the same sense that Le Pen and RN have been in France. Two consistent and essential hallmarks of fascism are extreme nationalism (“we” are for us!) and some type of blaming-the-Other, like anti-semitism or xenophobia (“they” are the problem!). Farage was the force behind both the Brexit referendum and it’s dishonest campaign. For both Farage and Le Pen, tamping down racist rhetoric is a campaign tactic — but there is good reason to believe neither mean it. Xenophobia and anti-immigration are important parts of their platforms. Several Reform candidates were formally removed from the party after making racist comments, something Farage brags about - yet he also tells voters to support them as independent candidates. Sky News reported that Farage blamed one incident caught on video as a hoax staged with a look-alike actor. Also on Sky News, one reporter said that Farage is intentionally channelling Trump’s style and substance at recent rallies, hoping to bring his American brand of right-wing populism to the UK. You don’t have to be a mind reader to understand what his motives are.
Technically, the Scottish National Party is larger than the Lib Dems, but SNP only operates in Scotland - and is likely to lose a number of seats to Labour on Thursday.
Constituencies in the UK have a larger proportional variation in population from district to district than US Congressional Districts, but they are far smaller averaging around 70,000 persons (compared to almost 800,000 in the US). This means that a few hundred votes shifting in a constituency can easily change the outcome.
See note 5.