October 4 2019
Welcome back to the tracker. I've teamed up with Profs Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart and Paul Whiteley to cut through the noise.
It’s been another turbulent week in British politics. Internal warfare erupted at the Labour conference. A bruised Boris Johnson sought to rally his troops at the Conservative conference. The new Brexit offer is now on the table. And both of the main parties have been reminded about the insurgents nipping at their heels.
Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats are rapidly closing in on Labour in the polls. They are attracting more than one in five people who voted Labour at the last election, in 2017, and nearly four in ten Remainers. This is dividing the Remain camp.
Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party, meanwhile, continue to attract around one one in four Leavers. This week saw Farage try to keep pressure on Boris Johnson by taking out full-page adverts in newspapers, framing the Brexit choice as a ‘clean break’ versus a ‘bad deal’. This is dividing the Leave camp.
So, what does all of this mean for Johnson and the Conservatives as they seek to win support for their new Brexit deal? Our analysis suggests that there is now only one way forward for the Prime Minister and his team. But before we get to that let’s look at the polls.
Our updated trend analysis, which covers 346 polls through to September 27 2019, puts the Conservatives on 32 (-1), Labour on 24 (no change), the Liberal Democrats on 21 (no change), the Brexit Party on 14 (+2) and the Greens on 4 (no change).
What might these numbers mean were a general election held tomorrow? Treat all estimates with caution but according to our simple swing model they would leave the Conservatives on 315 seats, Labour 225, SNP 50, Liberal Democrats 36, Greens 1, Brexit Party 1 and Plaid Cymru 4. Boris Johnson would be left short of a majority. Britain would have another minority government. The Brexit debate would go back to square one. Parliament would remain in paralysis. We also suspect that the Conservative Party's current internal numbers most likely have them in the 280-315 seat range.
These headline figures do mask considerable variation, however. Over the past week, the Conservative lead over Labour has ranged from a low of 3-points to a high of 15-points. Such volatility reflects great uncertainty among voters, as well as different choices that are being made by pollsters. The whole situation is very fluid.
Yet it does appear that the Conservative Party’s position has stabilised. There has been much criticism of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. But under their watch the Conservatives have moved into a stronger position. In the forty polls before Johnson took over his party the Conservatives had only led Labour in five of them. Of the forty-eight polls that we have had since he took over the Conservatives have led in all but two (one was a tie, the other a Labour lead within the margin of error). Jeremy Corbyn and Labour have not held a lead outside the margin of error since early July.
Nonetheless, some argue that Boris Johnson has now pushed his luck too far. The thinking goes like this. His new Brexit offer will likely fail to win majority support, from the European Union, from MPs, or both. In turn, the Benn Act will kick in, forcing Johnson to request an extension and break his cast iron promise to Leavers that he would deliver Brexit on October 31. He will then have to watch his electorate implode as conservatives defect en masse to the Brexit Party.
This is an interesting view. But it is not one that we share. The deal will likely fail to pass but much will then depend upon the attribution of blame as Britain heads into a general election. Who will be blamed for this 'failure'? Johnson is already in campaign mode, cultivating a narrative that points the finger at ‘the establishment’: MPs, Parliament, the Speaker, the Courts. All of the latter are already been presented as the 'Brexit blockers' who want to ‘surrender’ to the EU. In contrast, so the argument will go, only Boris will Get. Brexit. Done. A sign of what is on the horizon was found in the Prime Minister's interview this week with Andrew Marr, in which the theme of the interview was 'surrender'. As Fraser Nelson has pointed out, if there is an election 'then the Tory war cry will be: full steam ahead to a no-deal Brexit'.
Such a populist strategy will be criticised. It will fuel division and entrench polarisation. But from an electoral perspective the aim will be clear: to unify a divided Leave vote. There are already signs that it is working. This week, YouGov data suggested that 58% of Leavers now support the Conservatives, an increase of 10 points on late July. Gradually, slowly, Johnson is starting to pull the Leavers back. Even Farage is endorsing the embryonic strategy, urging Johnson: "to say that the Withdrawal agreement is dead and that a new government will negotiate a genuine free trade agreement with the EU. He could offer them a deadline of a few months in which to agree and, if they are not interested, Britain would leave the EU on WTO terms".
How might such a general election campaign, in which Boris Johnson advocates a harder Brexit deal, or no-deal at all, play out? All forecasts should be treated with extreme caution and never viewed as definitive. A simple and indicative estimate can be provided, though. Based on the latest polls, we assume that such a campaign would appeal to the 81% of Conservative voters, 96% of Brexit Party voters and also 11% of Labour voters who say that, at a second referendum, they would support a No Deal Brexit over Remain. But such a campaign would also likely alienate the 93% of Liberal Democrats, the 80% of Labour voters and the 12% of Conservatives who say they would back Remain against a No Deal. We move half of the latter to Labour and the other half to the Liberal Democrats.
As we show below, were Johnson and his team to successfully recruit Brexit Party voters then they would likely win sizeable majorities. If Johnson won back half of the Brexit Party vote then he might win a comfortable majority, with 348 seats to Labour’s 201. If he goes further and wins back three-quarters of Farage's Brexiteers then the number of Conservative seats increased at around 370 to Labour’s 185 - a commanding majority.
Might this actually happen? We do think that the Brexit Party vote is softer than some think, for a couple of reasons. First, when these voters are asked who would make the best Prime Minister -Johnson or Corbyn- they break 84% to 1% for Johnson. Lord Ashcroft asked a slightly different question, whether they would want to see a Conservative government led by Johnson or a Labour government led by Corbyn. 94% opted for a Johnson government. A campaign that inevitably presents voters with this simple binary choice would likely see many Brexit Party voters conclude "Johnson".
Even this week, as the pressure on Johnson became clear, large majorities of Brexit Party voters still felt that he is competent, decisive, strong, likeable, authentic and 'in touch with ordinary people'. In fact, 91% of Brexit Party voters openly reject the idea that Johnson should resign and want him to remain as Prime Minister. Put simply, these do not look like people who are about to revolt en masse. It was also telling that when Nigel Farage called on Johnson to resign he was widely criticised by his own voters on social media. Furthermore, so long as Johnson appears sincere in his support for a 'meaningful', 'clean' or 'hard' Brexit then these Brexit Party voters are instinctively on side. As polling made clear this week, 81% want Britain to leave with no deal while 91% would 'not be worried' if Britain left without a deal.
If we are right in thinking that the current Brexit deal has only a small chance of success then -electorally- the only viable option available to Johnson and his team is to head into a general election arguing that it is only they, the Conservative Party, that that will pull the United Kingdom out of the EU, with a harder deal or no deal if necessary. Trying to appease Remainers is, in the short-term, a losing strategy. Few will drift back to the Conservatives at the next election. This could leave Johnson and his party winning the Brexit battle but then facing a much tougher long war, as the divided Remain camp eventually rallies around a united movement. But for now, everything depends on winning over a big slice of the Brexit Party vote. For Boris Johnson, both his political future and that of his party depend on it.
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Technical Note
*We estimate votes to seats through a simple but indicative swing-based model. We estimate trends in vote intentions (using Hodrick-Prescott filter) and then compare the most recent vote intention figures with what each party received at the 2017 election. Differences in the percentages are applied to the vote shares each party received in each constituency in Britain. The party with the largest resulting adjusted percentage is the expected winner in a seat. Treat all forecasts with caution.
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