Polls Apart. What is really happening in this seemingly ceaseless election campaign?

It will end eventually. Honest. It has now been a shade over six weeks since Theresa May sprung a surprise general election on the British public but it feels so, so much longer. It has droned on with little sense of purpose. If a political enthusiast like me is sick and tired of it, what must more normal people be feeling? And those of them who thought that they could escape it by fleeing the country have discovered to their horror that, courtesy of British Airways, even that option is unavailable. As matters stand, probably the most popular last minute promise that any political party could make in the course of the next few days is to keep a Fixed Term Parliament Act but for a 10-year Parliament.
It has, though, the commentators insist, become ‘more interesting’. This is true if that phrase is deemed to be interchangeable with ‘less predictable’. This is a dubious assertion. After all, if it were to rain solidly for a month on the Spanish coastline this August then the climate there would clearly have become ‘less predictable’ but whether the tourists concerned considered it ‘more interesting’ as a consequence is more debatable.
Nevertheless, the polling industry - which in 2015 spent much of the election split between those who conducted telephone surveys, which tended to produce a lead for the Conservatives, and another camp who operated online, and regularly offered a Labour edge, before merging in the last few days of the campaign to argue unanimously that a dead heat was about to ensue (and hence all be proven mistaken) - has in 2017 produced a new division.
Back in April, almost every pollster agreed that the Conservatives were 18-20 percentage points ahead and hence heading towards a landslide victory on a scale of Margaret Thatcher in 1983 or Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001. Now in very late May there are two camps among the polling community. The first believes that the Conservative advantage has slid back to the 12-14 point range (still enough for the Prime Minister to finish with a 100 seat plus majority). The second insists that the Conservative fall has been much more dramatic and that their lead is closer to a 6-9 point spread (a number that is more consistent with a Conservative majority of 50 seats or less inside the next House of Commons). In the most extreme example of this trend yet, YouGov for The Times last night produced a Conservative lead of a mere four points and predicted a hung Parliament on that basis.
What is the cause of this division? Which camp may be considered the more credible in calculation?
The two sides actually agree on most of the fundamentals as to what is happening with the voters.
The Conservative vote has edged down slightly, but appears to be distinctly solid
While the rival polling firms disagree on the extent of the Conservative lead, none of them suggest that there has been a collapse in the actual Conservative vote. Excluding outliers, the movement has been of a modest one to two percentage points downwards. If there has been any ‘dementia tax’ effect it has been on the softest of their supporters.
In 2015, the Conservatives and UKIP between them secured around 50% of the national vote with David Cameron winning about 75% of that total. In the typical poll conducted this time, the Conservatives and UKIP are again receiving about half of the electorate between them but Mrs May is taking an 85%-90% chunk of that electorate. As UKIP is standing in far fewer seats in 2017 than 2015 and has a much less effective leader, there is not much reason to conclude that the current numbers for the two centre-right parties will change from where they are and that being so the Prime Minister can be sure of securing a mandate for a term in office. How large her majority turns out to be will depend, however, less on her own efforts but the means by which the non-Conservative vote divides, a matter which is almost entirely out of her control.
Labour has advanced at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, Greens and the Don’t Knows
The real story of the past few weeks is that the Labour Party has succeeded in emphasising its brand and by so doing has smothered some doubts about its leadership. A series of shamelessly populist policy stances appears to have drawn back some former Labour adherents who had threatened to bolt to the Liberal Democrats, raided the Green electorate and appealed to some of those who had backed Labour in 2015 but switched to ‘Don’t Know’ largely because of Jeremy Corbyn personally.
The last two parts of this process were arguably inevitable provided that Labour did not go into a total meltdown scenario before polling day (which it still could). The movement from the Lib Dems to Labour, by contrast, is the exact opposite of what many (including Tim Farron) had assumed to be highly likely. The Liberal Democrats started the election with a serious dilemma about targeting and have either failed to resolve it or made the wrong call in deciding to be the party of a second ballot on EU membership, so leaving the whole anti-austerity, NHS/social care territory to Mr Corbyn. On current trends, the Liberal Democrats may win scarcely any more votes than they did in 2015 and could even emerge with a net loss of seats (a reduction to three to five MPs is no longer absurd). At least Mr Farron will be safe in his post. There will almost be no one else eligible to challenge him.
Whether this (unstated) assessment proves to be correct and exactly when it happens would have an important, if at this stage unpredictable, effect on the character of the Brexit bargaining, the overall condition of British politics and the date of the next general election (in another under-noted element of Mrs May’ manifesto she has pledged to repeal the Fixed-Term Parliament Act if elected).
There appears to be a distinct geographical pattern to the changes in party support so far
This is harder to assess as sampling sizes are small and outside of Scotland polling of nations and regions is infrequent and can be inconsistent. The best assessment despite this is that Labour is performing relatively strongly in certain heartlands, namely London, metropolitan Manchester and Liverpool and Wales. It appears to be picking up some backing, albeit from a very low base, in the South East and South West of England. It appears to be much more vulnerable in the North West of England outside of the mega-cities, the Midlands and Yorkshire/Humberside. It is heading backwards in Scotland where the only dispute is whether the Conservatives or SNP take its one remaining seat.
This pattern matters because it suggests that Labour is doing well in places where it already has all the seats it can expect to win or where it has no chance of adding to its tally. It is exposed in parts of England where there are plenty of seats that it could lose. This leads to the conclusion that even if the Conservative edge on 8 June is at the lowest end of the 6-9 point spread, Mrs May will see her majority increase by 20-25 seats even though her popular vote advantage was less than in 2015.
What, then, is the real difference between the two sets of opinion polls?
The real difference is that the first set of pollsters asserts that the Labour vote is about 30%-32% (or roughly what it was in 2015) while the second contingent contends that it is closer to 34%-36% (so higher than two years ago). Even here, the argument is more about methodology than it is about the raw numbers themselves. All pollsters are detecting that Labour in general and Mr Corbyn as a leader is doing disproportionately well amongst younger voters (especially those in the 18-24 range) who insist that they will cast a ballot paper eight days hence, and among those who, regardless of age, admit that they did not vote in the 2015 election and in many cases did not vote in 2010 either.
The first camp of pollsters, remembering that the biggest mistake they made in 2015 was that they overestimated the Labour turnout among the young and those with a weak past record of voting, is to assume that these theoretical Labour supporters will not turn out en masse. The second group of pollsters, recalling that the biggest mistake they made in 2016 was to discount those who intended to vote Leave but had a poor record in taking part in general elections, are taking these citizens at their word. I agree with the first contingent but can understand the dilemma of the second section. On this call depends the size of the Conservative majority and what happens in UK politics after it.
Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA