Are the Tories really facing electoral oblivion at the next general election? Why the numbers tell a story that’s even worse than you might think
One of the things about the current parliament that I find strange is the extent to which there is a sort of inbuilt assumption that polling which is apocalyptically bad for the Tories must ultimately be, in some real, practical sense, incorrect. Not that political pundits think people are lying to pollsters, or that YouGov or anyone else is trying to engineer some specific result, no. It’s just that there is a presupposition that the Tories won’t really poll anything like 21% come the next general election. Closet Tories will come out to vote, people will remember what they don’t like about the Labour party and then it won’t be anywhere near as bad as the polls are currently telling us it will be for the Conservatives.
The Tories better assume the inbuilt prejudices of Westminster punditry really are bang on in this regard given the polls are way beyond dire for them - they are looking at an extinction event if the numbers stay the way they are and turn out to be correct. In fact, let’s drill into the figures here, because the polling is actually even worse for the Tories than is widely assumed.
The last eight national polls from the major polling companies, starting from the most recent and working backwards, have Labour leads of 34, 28, 29, 30, 25, 27, 21 and 32. The figure that may have jumped out at you in that sequence is 21, the lowest by far - that’s from Opinium, who in February changed their methodology slightly in a way that was punitive to Labour. Noticing that there had been a lot of people switching from saying they would vote Tory to “I don’t know”, they decided that instead of just losing these people altogether from the sample, Opinium would assume a reasonable portion of them will vote the way they had at the last general election. As a result, Opinium have shown lower Labour poll leads than the other polling companies since. So for them to have Labour 21% ahead of the Conservatives is massively significant - it shows that people are not only turning away from the Tories but are also turning towards Labour at the same time.
Yet if there was only the national polling to go off of, you might try and argue that the Conservative vote is probably geographically well situated to avoiding a disaster under First Past the Post. Except that the regional polling is just as terrible for them, if not more so. They look set to lose every seat in Scotland - not that big a deal as they don’t hold all that many now anyhow - as well as a Tory wipeout in Wales, which is more significant for them. Between Scotland and Wales, that would be 20 less Tory seats. Okay, not the end of the world, you say. They would still have a majority if this is all they lost at the next election.
Yet that’s just for starters. Next we come to the 48 seats in England the Tories gained in 2019 off of Labour, generally referred to as the “Red Wall”. There are endless arguments about what actually constitutes the Red Wall and what does not but for the sake of this article, I’m simply looking at these 48 seats. Redfield and Wilton have been running regular polls in 40 of these seats and they have been bad for the Tories for a while now. The last Red Wall specific poll they did was on October 4th and had Labour on 61% in these constituencies, versus the Tories on 23%, a Labour lead of 38%. If those numbers were replicated in a general election, Conservative party would almost certainly lose all 48 seats to Labour.
Okay, so now the Tory troubles begin. Take 68 seats off their current tally (20 in Scotland/Wales + 48 Red Wall) and they are left with 288. Labour, if all those constituencies went over to them as the polling suggests, would then have 266, assuming they pick up nothing off the SNP in Scotland. The Tories are still the largest party here and this scenario still wouldn’t be all that bad for them. There’s no way the Conservatives could form a government, but Labour would be left trying to do something with a nightmare SNP-Lib Dem confidence and supply deal that would still only have a razor-thin majority on agreed policies. The Tories could rebuild and possibly win the general election after that.
However, as you may have guessed already, this is not where the regional polling woes for the Tories end. This week, Redfield and Wilton did a poll of the “Blue Wall”, using as their criteria for this constituencies that have voted Tory in all of the last three general elections, currently have Conservative majorities of less than 10,000 and had a Remain vote in 2016 of at least 42.5% (which is a low bar for Remainerism, but hey ho). In other words, Tory seats that should be vulnerable given the current leadership and polling.
Boris Johnson was disliked in this part of England and replacing him should have given the Tories the chance to convince a lot of these voters to stick with them next time round. Except, it looks like they like Liz Truss even less than BoJo. Redfield and Wilton’s Blue Wall poll looked at 42 seats - and the results are incredible. The Tory vote is down in these constituencies by 20 points on 2019, with the Labour vote up 22 (they are taking votes off the Lib Dems as well as the Conservatives). This means that of the 42 seats up for grabs here, the Tories would retain only seven, a loss of 35.
After applying these changes alongside the numbers from Scotland, Wales and the Red Wall, the Tories would be on 253, a sort of Labour post-2010 kind of a level. Again, some might argue that wouldn’t be the end of the world for the Conservative party. Labour still wouldn’t have a majority, as they only gain 25 seats in the Blue Wall, bringing them up to 291. The largest party, but still having to deal with the SNP to get anything done. That could be messy and if the Tories return to sanity in opposition, they could still be back in after one parliament.
Except, that’s still not even close to the end of the story. Take the constituency of Hastings and Rye. The Tories got it back off Labour in 2010, but the majority has never stablised in their favour (for instance, Labour got within 346 votes of taking it in 2017). I didn’t include it in my “Red Wall” numbers given it wasn’t a Tory gain from Labour at the last general election, but it’s key to this discussion because there are loads of seats like Hastings and Rye, ones that have been Tory for a while, constituencies that were in some danger even before this recent polling meltdown and appear to be more so now. And even if the Conservative numbers recover a little, loads of these sorts of seats still look very much like they will be lost by the Tories next time round.
Another example of this is Southampton Hitchen, Went Labour in the Blair years and remained so until 2015, but Tory since. Or Norwich North. Or Altrincham and Sale West. I could go on and on, as there are probably somewhere in the range of around 100 seats in England roughly like this. Again, on anything like current polling, or even if the Tories get back up to say, 30% nationally, a huge number of these seats are going to be Tory no longer after the next general election.
How many out of this last chunk of constituencies I’ve identified could the Conservative party actually lose at the next election? Hard to say because current national polling would have them lose pretty much every one of them, i.e. if you apply national swing, the overwhelming majority of them are gone. But if the Tories lost only say, 30 of these seats, that wouldn’t be bad considering how terrible the polls are currently. And I haven’t even yet mentioned local polling for London, which suggests the Tories would lose every seat in the capital, which would be an extra 10 constituencies I didn’t include in the Blue Wall analysis lost from the Tory tally.
Which means, after all that, the Conservatives are looking at being happy if they only go down to 218 seats, leaving Labour on 331, a slim but workable majority.
However, what we still haven’t come on to is how many seats that would have to be classified in every period up until 2022 as iron-clad, safe Tory seats that might be up for grabs next time. Take North Shropshire, now a Lib Dem seat after the by election that followed the Owen Paterson affair. This would previously have been considered a completely safe constituency for the Tories. Of course, you can cite the situation that led to the by election and say it was a one-off protest vote, sure, but it’s still amazing that the Conservatives could lose that seat under any circumstances. There are lots of currently Tory-held seats that would have been considered much less safe than North Shropshire pre-2019 that the Conservatives now need to consider their approach to. Where do they allocate resource at the next election? They can’t assume every constituency is in danger or else they will spread themselves too thin on the ground. And yet, they can’t assume anywhere is safe either.
Somewhere around 26%, something important happens under First Past the Post - it’s the place where you cross over into either becoming a major party or descending into being a minor one. In other words, the difference between the number of seats you can win on say, 27% of the vote, versus how many you can win on about 24% is highly significant. In 1983, Labour got their worst share of the national vote since 1918, managing to get only 27.6%. However, they ended up with 209 seats - bad, but not the end of the party as a national force, as history has since proven. In the same election, the SDP (in alliance with the Liberals) got 25.4% of the vote - and ended up with only 23 seats. That party didn’t see out the end of the 1980s.
Wherever the threshold exactly numerically lies, there is definitely a point under FPTP where you start to either win shedloads of seats or lose massive amounts of them (or fail to win any, if you didn’t start with much), depending on which side of the line you fall, with only a percentage point or two making a massive difference. There is a place which could see the Tories poll so badly, they go below 100 seats. This sounds impossible - which is why political pundits are discounting it happening - but if Conservative voter numbers drop below a certain level, that is exactly what will happen.
Here are the top line Tory figures from those same last eight national polls I cited earlier: 19, 23, 25, 22, 26, 24, 26, 20 and 26. None get them above the 26% threshold I mentioned above and a few of them, the 19% one in particular, would represent an near-extinction event for the Conservative party if they actually occurred (19% nationally would almost certainly translate into less than 40 seats, even if they got lucky with geographic vote distribution). Again, one can make the argument that our current situation represents a low watermark level for Tory polling, brought on by the mini-budget fallout, and that there is no way the Tories will poll below say, 28% in an actual general election. You could, on the other hand, point out that the polls are refusing to budge in the Tories’ favour and they should start to worry if they don’t begin to poll above 26% fairly soon.
What do I think will happen? I genuinely have no idea except to say I don’t immediately see how the Tories can recover enough to lose the next election gracefully and have any hope of ending up with a hung parliament that would be tricky for Starmer to navigate. They could in theory get rid of Truss quickly and rally around a new leader that could stabilise them enough to think 250+ seats at the next election is a reasonable expectation. But I don’t think they have it in them to do this. I figure they’ll stick with Truss longer than they should do. And I know this much for certain - if they really do poll 19% at the next general election, the result will be the actual end of the Conservative party, forever.
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I was with this until the penultimate paragraph and Nick's comment that Tories cease to exist on 19%. If true lots of smaller parties including Liberal Democrats wouldn't exist but do.
A pity the Lib Dems haven't pushed their USP Europe more strongly but still time in this fevered atmosphere.
The destruction Brexit has brought a perfect illustration of the need for stability that PR would bring
I don't know about actual 19% being the end of the conservative party for ever. This could be political gravity - being in a world where the Tories are the "natural party of government" it could just be that like the Westminster pundits, it's impossible for me to believe that could ever happen. I also don't think it's true that just one disastrous election defeat could mean that the Tories can never come back. The effect of that would be sobering on the party, but I still think that there are too many basically Tory voters in this country for that to last for ever unless the party itself disintegrates after having a disaster like that. If they get themselves back to being even halfway sane after the Brexit and Boris years, surely there are too many natural Tories who will come back to them after a term or two of Labour governments for the party to be gone forever.