If psephology is the study of voters and elections, the left increasingly specialises in pseudo-psephology: the study of voters that do not exist and elections that never happened. The first and most popular example of this is the 1992 election: a closely-fought battle that Labour lost right at the death. But the real 1992 election was a thumping: Labour finished desperately adrift of the Conservatives and John Major got more votes than Margaret Thatcher ever did. Only tactical voting and bad polling meant that the Labour party was able to pretend that it was ever at the races.
Then there was the 1997 election: always in the bag – wasn’t it? Because having failed to win three on the trot in a recessional economy, having blown hefty leads in 1964 and 1970, of course, there was no reason to believe that Labour could possibly lose again as prosperity was rising.
The study of the 2015 election is already a cottage industry, and this week the Fabian Society mapped out where Labour’s polling lead comes from. The lead comes from a combination of people who voted for the Liberal Democrats or simply didn’t vote (unkinder observers might wonder what the practical difference between these two choices has turned out to be).
I’m not sure what I find more disconcerting: the figures themselves, or that some commentators are quite relaxed about this. The Liberal Democrats got 23 per cent of the vote in 2010 and got eight per cent of the seats. Their vote is thinly spread – even assuming a frankly improbable level of voter retention on the part of Labour, what we’re talking about is a net gain of a handful of seats and some second-place finishes in Devon and Somerset. And let’s be reasonable: as we will see in Eastleigh, when the chips are down, Labour supporters will still vote for the Liberals, because here’s an unfortunate truth: voters can count. In many Lib-Con marginals, Labour has retreated to the point where it not only does not have any councillors, it often doesn’t even field candidates. When one half of your path to victory includes a great number of people who haven’t cast a vote for Labour since the Pokémon franchise, if at all, you have problems.
It could be worse, because if one half of the road to victory is paved with people who don’t vote for Labour, the other half is paved with people who don’t vote. Writing for LabourList, Fabian Society general secretary Andrew Harrop describes this as an ‘Obama-style’ campaign. But actually, it’s a ‘Romney-style’ campaign. It was Mitt Romney who spent his campaign’s last hours desperately trying to expand the map and win Pennsylvania – with zero consequences. The Obama majority wasn’t based on ‘unlikely voters’: the only people who think it was are Republicans, who had spent the last two years trying to make it harder for black and Hispanic people to vote, and British America-watchers, most of whom switch off between the midterms and the presidential elections. This is a problem, because the nature of a two-year time period is that quite a lot of stuff happens. Far from eking out a narrow victory out of ‘unlikely voters’, the Obama campaign won a landslide on the back of predictable demographic trends.
Labour should be worried: too many of its voters are motivated by a hatred of Nick Clegg above all else, too many of its voters still think David Cameron would make a better prime minister than Ed Miliband, too many of its voters think Labour isn’t serious on the economy.
The temptation is to use that worry as an excuse to head for the comfort zone: to create a fictitious path to victory which allows us to talk about what we like to the people we like. Labour’s actual path to victory is rather easy: there are 40 seats that the Conservatives are going to fight tooth and nail to hold on to, and 40 seats that the Conservatives are going to try and take.
We know what the concerns of those voters are; we have the data to draw on. So why not talk about them?
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
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Rather than respond in detail let me point you to the excellent Progress pamphlet ‘Marginal Difference’ by Lewis Baston which shows that winning marginals depends on ex Lib Dems, ex non-voters and, yes, some ex-Conservatives.
http://archive.progressonline.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Marginal-Difference_Final.pdf
I agree that it’s a great piece of work – does this mean you’ve abandoned your earlier argument around ‘Ed’s converts’?
Allow me to shock and surprise you Stephen by picking up on the subject of Barack Obama’s campaign… 🙂
The Obama campaign was ruthlessly and relentlessly focused on low propensity voters: traditional Democratic minded voters that don’t normally vote. As someone who has fought 3 midterms I’ve seen the difference their presence does and doesn’t make! They have been a rising demographic for some time (200 years you might say) but the reason they made up a larger proportion of the electorate this time was because they were such a focus of the campaign. Here’s a good flavor of the Messina view during the heat of the campaign: http://thepage.time.com/2012/10/24/the-latest-view-from-one-prudential-plaza-why-the-obama-campaign-is-still-so-confident-about-beating-romney/ For further reading on how best to organize around low propensity voters I commend http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Victory-Lab-Science-Campaigns/dp/030795479X and the work Labour’s own Arnie Graff is doing http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/nov/21/arnie-graf-labour-party-miliband
Hi Marcus – but the crucial point there, as I’ve said above, is that midterms & Presidential elections are fundamentally different elections. (This is why Rasmussen’s weighting is always off). Without wishing to diminish one of the most effective political machines built in recent times, the only people who were surprised by turnout in 2012 were Republicans. It was an ‘as expected’ election, considering the personal profile of the candidate. (This is why I think the GOP can only win if the Democrats nominate a white man next time out)
That national profile, too, is important: as I’ve said above, the African-American electorate has been growing and continues to grow. It recieved a boost in 2008 because Obama was the first serious African-American candidate for the Presidency. He benefitted from his own charisma and machine, yes, but also from the unique character of American racial politics. What demographics do you anticipate being similarly spurred into action by Ed Miliband?