Squeezing the “f*** off” vote
Peter Kellner of YouGov has a piece in The Sunday Times, not yet posted on YouGov, making the point that Ukip’s vote is critical to the general election. How much can it be squeezed down from the current average of around 13 per cent?
Get it down to 6 per cent and the Tories might yet be largest party. If it stays up around 10 per cent, Labour only has to get 35 per cent of the poll to win and that’s not unrealistic.
Labour’s pollsters think Ukip support won’t be below 9 per cent in the general election, which makes the Tories’ chances of being the largest party negligible. One of their pollsters calls it the “f*** off” vote, now a phenomenon across Europe and elsewhere, a section of voters who feel left out, are angry and have lost trust in conventional politics.
Tory strategists are working off polling they’ve done suggesting that these Ukip voters can be pulled back to the Tories in big numbers to win – if these voters think an Ed Miliband government is a serious possibility. But they need to show concrete achievements in government on areas that quicken these types of voters’ pulses (welfare is more important than immigration here).
Baffled by the Global Race
The conference in Manchester is emblazoned with the slogan “for hard-working people” because those voters aren’t at all sure the Tories are for such groups. Tory research suggested that the “global race” slogan deployed last year and many times since by David Cameron doesn’t connect with voters and leaves them slightly baffled. The shape of the Tory message remains the same as David Cameron’s speech to his conference last year but it’ll now be much more peppered with rhetoric and policy to connect it (they hope) to everyday lives.
Bringing forward “Help to Buy” is all part of that. The Coalition parties have exceeded their normal quota of five or so policies each to be announced at their respective conferences and lavished about 10 apiece – one senior civil servant said it had meant the normally quiet conference period in Whitehall had been anything but.
Miliband’s challenge
For all the “back to the 70’s” talk, every senior Tory I’ve spoken to privately in the last few days thinks Ed Miliband had no choice but to go down the route he did in his speech on Tuesday and that he did it quite well. All say he has raised his share price and upped his game – not helpful when one of the main legs of the Tory campaign is to contrast his “weak leadership” with David Cameron’s “strong leadership.”
On the big challenge Labour has posed – whether they can make this a “living standards” election – the Tories’ strategists think voters don’t actually separate living standards from the economy and economic management. For their own sake, they need to be right on that.
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