Mainstream parties in western countries are not short of advice on why they have been losing support to populists in recent years, or on the kinds of policy prescriptions that could help them win that support back.
For Britain’s Labour party, there is a Blue Labour critique, which emphasises the role of immigration and cultural factors in dividing the party from its traditional working-class base, and which argues Labour needs to do more to show it is taking those concerns seriously.
There is also what you might call an economic left critique, which pins the blame instead on ‘neoliberal’ economic policies over the past three decades; and proposes solutions including more protection for workers, more intervention in industry and more public spending in the north.
And then there is a metropolitan liberal critique, which argues that in all these efforts to win back voters in the ‘Red Wall’, Labour risks losing the support of the urban graduates who now constitute the bulk of its support and who are already beginning to drift away to the Lib Dems and the Greens.
For all the disagreements between the proponents of each critique, they largely agree with each other on one thing: that the defection of Labour voters to Reform has more to do with identity politics than rational self-interest, and that those voters will end up worse off if Reform gets into power, because of the incoherence and contradictions in the Reform policy programme.
They may well be right about this. But there is an unspoken assumption here, which is that before the rise of the populists, things were different: people would vote rationally for the party whose policies best served their interests, until something then happened in the 2010s which seemed to make people more susceptible to emotive arguments or misinformation.
For the most part, that isn’t true. And understanding this puts a different gloss on some of the choices for the parties ahead of the next election.
The truth is that voters have never been very interested in politics and have never paid much attention to parties’ policy programmes. The factors which shape voting intentions today are not much different from in the past:
- The first is who ‘people like me’ are voting for. In that respect, identity is not a new factor in voting intentions. For much of the post-war era, social class was a key plank of identity and the industrial working class was a substantial proportion of the electorate, and this provided a solid base for the Labour party, irrespective of what policies it was putting forward at a given election. Today, identity still matters, but traditional categories of social class appear to be less important than university attendance in shaping the aspects of identity that influence voting intention.
- The second is short term economic factors. I have explained elsewhere that the most important economic indicator in an election campaign is whether the disposable income of the median household is rising or falling in the six months prior to the election; and that the most potent political attacks are those which highlight a credible and near-term threat to household finances (or, to a lesser extent, their personal experience of public services or their security).
- The third factor is leadership. This seems to matter for opposition leaders in particular. A serving prime minister might not be popular but still be seen, by definition, as prime ministerial, whereas a leader of the opposition is more exposed to an attack that they are personally not suited to the job or are too big a risk. Neil Kinnock, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn all suffered because of this.
Although these things have not changed much over the past few decades, what is different now is the greater degree of electoral volatility, especially with traditional social class distinctions providing less of an anchor. Another change is in how the parties reach voters and how the voters consume news, with much less of a role being played by the traditional media than in the past and more of a role for social networks.
What does all this mean for the parties today?
First, if Reform derive the bulk of their support from non-graduates (who outnumber graduates 62% to 38%) and those who voted for Brexit (52% to 48%) it suggests they may still be quite some way from the upper limit of their support.
It also suggests that highlighting the contradictions in their policy programme may not be a very potent attack. Voters aren’t especially interested in policy and they tend to be sceptical that politicians will keep their promises anyway. Plus, the Brexit referendum shows that having a voting coalition that wants mutually incompatible things need not be a barrier to victory. But if a Reform election victory begins to look like a realistic prospect, they will be more vulnerable to attacks based on the near-term economic consequences for households and to attacks based on whether their leaders can be trusted.
For Labour, it suggests that the ‘people like me’ gap between their traditional working-class voters and their metropolitan graduate voters is not likely to be solved by throwing out policies designed to appeal to narrow voter segments, particularly if they are expensive policies that voters worry will lead to their taxes being put up. Increasing volatility is eroding the idea of core and floating voters anyway, so to win an election a party needs the support of a very wide range of people, and this requires talking about the issues that a majority of voters say they care about. If ‘people like me’ are ‘most people’, you’re onto a winner.
It also suggests that Keir Starmer’s personal popularity or charisma is going to be much less important than whether people are feeling better off in the run-up to the election (and, to a lesser though still important extent, whether their personal experience of public services is improving). This is why the government’s current focus on delivery is so important.
In some respects, the trickiest challenge is for the Conservatives. Delivery can’t be the answer for them because they’re not in government. They could be the beneficiaries of a government failure to deliver but Reform are competing with them to take advantage of that. They could fill a policy gap as the free-market party if Labour and Reform both go for interventionism but that requires getting the voters’ attention on policy and framing the divide in a way that benefits the Conservatives rather than their opponents. And their leader is not very popular.
I want to finish on a point that makes life difficult for political strategists in all parties. They are ideologically committed political obsessives trying to appeal to people who don’t care about politics, so if they rely on their instincts about what will work, they will likely get it wrong. They are also demographically different from the voters they are trying to reach. As David Shor has pointed out in respect of the US, political campaigns are staffed largely by 20-something graduates on the coasts, whereas the median voter in a general election is 50 years old, doesn’t have a degree and doesn’t live in a major city.
Whichever party we are talking about, getting the judgment calls right ahead of the next election is likely to require leaving a lot of personal prejudices at the door.
