For Conservative-to-Reform defectors, this small boat has already sailed…
Adam Drummond, Research Director, suggests that voters switching to Reform UK from the Conservative Party are not going to be easily won back.
Earlier this week, Lee Anderson MP switched party for the second time (he was a Labour councillor until 2018 before being elected as a Conservative MP in 2019) and joined Reform UK, becoming the highest profile example of a journey taken by lots of people who voted Conservative in 2019.
On the face of it this is obviously a bad story for the Conservatives, but the second issue they have is how much focus it puts on only one group of Tory defectors to the exclusion of two other equally important groups - namely those who have moved to “don’t know” and those who have moved to Labour.
To recap, here is what voting intention is now compared to the 2019 election:
Labour up 9 points, the Greens up 4, Reform UK up 9 points on the Brexit Party’s share, and the Conservatives down 20 points. Here is where that 20% have gone to and, for comparison, what the equivalent is for Labour voters:
The Conservatives are holding onto less than half of the voters who supported them in 2019. 14% are going to Reform UK but 13% are going to Labour (it’s even closer than that: Labour is actually 13.44%, Reform are actually 13.55%) and 20% have gone to “don’t know”.
For comparison, Labour have fewer 2019 voters but they’re holding onto a far larger share of them. The main “other party” switchers are 3% going to the Lib Dems and 5% going to the Greens.
The problem the Tories have is similar to the one facing Labour in the mid-2010s: they’re bleeding votes in lots of contradictory directions and what might work to win back one group is likely to further alienate all of the others.
To illustrate this, we’ve looked at the four main groups of 2019 Conservative voters: those who have stuck with the Tories, those who have switched to Labour, those who have switched to Reform, and those who are currently saying don’t know.
At a basic level, here is their likelihood to consider voting for the Conservative Party in the future:
Obviously the best group for the Conservatives are those who say they would still vote for them (a few saying “probably not” notwithstanding). Otherwise there is a huge gap between those who have moved to Don’t Know (DK) and those who have actively chosen another party. Those who have moved to Reform are almost as unobtainable as those who have moved to Labour.
The pattern also comes through when we look at approval ratings. To nobody’s surprise, those who are sticking with the Tories quite like Rishi Sunak and those who have switched to Labour quite like Keir Starmer. There is a classic chicken-and-egg question about Labour switchers but it is reasonable to assume that those who like Keir Starmer have mostly already moved to Labour.
What’s interesting here though is that Conservatives who have moved to Reform really dislike both leaders and dislike Sunak even more than Con>Lab switchers. Those who have moved to “don’t know”, while net negative, are the group most amenable to Sunak and to the party as a whole.
Approval ratings for a couple of other politicians give an indication of the divide between these groups. Here’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron:
Con>Reform switchers strongly dislike him while Con>DK voters think more positively of him.
For Nigel Farage, Con>Reform switchers love him but Con>Lab dislike him and Con>DK are evenly split. Given that the latter group are the most gettable voters for Sunak, it’s not clear that going in more of a pro-Farage direction would yield more votes than it would lose, but it’s also clear how much damage Farage could do to the Conservatives if he wanted to.
Some other issues also highlight the extent of these differences. When we ask a series of questions about immigration, Con>Reform switchers are those with the hardest-line immigration views.
We ask a standard “is immigration too high or too low” question and the results are fairly predictable: most people think it’s too high and there isn’t much nuance between groups. But we get a more interesting finding if we ask what the government’s priority should be on immigration and here we can see this difference between Con>DK and Con>Reform:
This is an attempt at getting into the “control vs. numbers” debate. At a total population level, voters are fairly evenly divided. All of the various groups of 2019 Conservative voters come down on the side of numbers rather than control but while the difference is 4 points for Con>DK voters, for Con>Reform voters it’s 54 points. Nobody moving from Con>Reform says “don’t know” to an immigration question.
In another question we ask about different types of immigrants coming to the UK and while there are too many to go into here, a good proxy for the median/more sympathetic group is “agricultural workers” where the national mood is that the numbers are a bit low or about right. Con>DK voters are in line with the average but Con>Reform voters are much more hawkish.
Everything the Conservative Party is saying seems to be geared towards trying to win back the votes of people who have views that cannot be satisfied unless the government actually can reduce net migration by an unfeasibly large amount between now and the general election. They dislike Rishi Sunak almost as much as they dislike Keir Starmer and are as unwilling to vote Conservative as those who have moved directly to Labour.
It's understandable that the Conservative Party might find it more emotionally satisfying to try giving defectors to Reform what they want, rather than trying to persuade middle-ground Conservatives on the fence to return to the fold. Nevertheless, addressing the concerns that “don’t knows” have on cost of living and other more bread-and-butter issues would pay far greater dividends than telling immigration hardliners “yes we’ve failed on your most important issue but we’re just as angry as you are about it”.
As seen originally in Lansons-Opinium Political Capital.
Here is my detailed analysis of how to make sense of the opinion polls and what the likely outcome of the next general election will be:
https://britishpatriot.substack.com/p/making-polls-make-sense
Read, enjoy and leave a comment!
The BRITISH PATRIOT