I’m not going to talk about demography or geography of seats – apart from to remind us of usual election calculus that as always the result is decided by a fraction of the electorate. So we know that generally there are only 20 per cent of the population who will shift their vote between parties, but that this will count in only those 20 per cent of constituencies that are marginal. We also know that only around 60 per cent of people will vote, which gives us around two per cent of the population or one million people who will decide the next election, as has been the case in all elections before.
But that doesn’t really help us in terms of how the election will be decided. What I do think is still useful is the old model we’ve used for years of the political triangle, where how people vote is decided by three key factors – their views of the parties, their views of the leaders and their views of the issues.
Taking each in turn they all paint quite a challenging picture for the government and Labour.
So firstly on party identification, which is the least important side of the political triangle, but still significant. There have been some questions on whether the measures in the pre-budget report, particularly the increased tax on high earners, marks a shift to the left. This has maybe been overblown in the reporting of it as the death of New Labour, but the majority do see it as a leftwards shift. And this is at a time that lots of work is showing that the electorate overall is shifting to the right in terms of their concerns and values – seen in work by John Bartle at Essex, using a wide range of questions going back a number of years and something we’ve seen in our own work on values.
What’s not clear is whether the huge changes in the economy and a significant recession will shift this landscape again – we’ve seldom seen a faster moving or more erratic polling, so no one can say with any certainty at all how this will play out – but for now it seems very unlikely.
And we’ve seen some of that changeability on the second key issue of leadership, which has increased in importance for people over the last few years and is just about as important as the issues. There was certainly a bit of bounce over the last few weeks. A couple of weeks ago the Brown/Darling combination was significantly ahead of Cameron/Osborne but we’ve already seen that slip back quite significantly. And while they may seem a bit trite, those split questions which ask firstly who you think will be the best leader for now in a recession, which show a Brown lead, and then who you think would be the best leader at the time of the next election, which show a clear Cameron lead, do show the growing acceptability of Cameron.
And interestingly they do confirm what we ALL already know that Osborne is an electoral liability – Cameron on his own has a much larger lead than when you team him up with Osborne.
So onto the issues, which people still just about say is the most important factor in deciding their vote. This is clearly dominated by the economy and is likely to continue to be so. We’ve seen this in the past in our monthly Issues Index that have run back to the 1970s, that when economic concerns arise they dominate all others.
And we’ve seen that recently, with our most recent poll last week showing that 69 per cent of people now say the economy is the most important issue facing the country – the highest level we’ve ever seen and the quickest rise we’ve ever seen.
But the most interesting aspect of this to me is that it hasn’t even really started to feed through into concern about jobs – still only 15 per cent of the population think unemployment is one of the most important issues facing the country, which has hardly shifted over recent months. But that is clearly going to rise, in a similar pattern to what we’ve seen before, and it is clearly when these impacts are seen on the real economy that resentment towards the government will rise.
And just on the reaction to the measures announced in the PBR, all polls seems to be showing a fairly lukewarm response to a multi-billion pound giveaway. We’ve got a poll coming out in the Observer tomorrow, which broadly confirms the pattern seen already – that more people support the plans than oppose them, but only just. But that they don’t expect to increase their own spending as a result (only five to six per cent in number of polls say that will), and in the long-term they are slightly more likely to feel they would be better off under a Conservative government – which is a huge shift away from the large advantage Labour had on economic issues just 18 months ago.
And at the heart of this is real concern about debt – people don’t like the idea of going further into debt – three quarters of people think it is only storing up problems for the future. The line of debt having got us into trouble so how can it get us out is powerful, as is the very old comparison between governmentt and households or businesses and their need to balance the books.