5 lessons from the last election for the next election
3 years down, 2 to go, everything to play for
Three years ago today, the late December dawn brought a close to another long night of vote counting. Boris Johnson had secured the Conservatives their biggest majority since Mrs Thatcher’s second landslide in 1987, while Labour under Jeremy Corbyn had been reduced to their lowest seat total since 1935. What lessons can we take from that contest for the next campaign, now less than two years away?
Boris Johnson won where it mattered, but he was never popular
Johnson’s big win encouraged an already widespread belief that he was a politician with unique popular appeal. This was, like many Johnsonian ideas, a half-truth inflated by bluster. Johnson had a pull on the Leave voters being targeted by the Conservatives, but this was from the start bound up with his promise to “Get Brexit Done”. And his attraction in some quarters was balanced by repulsion in others. Johnson’s overall ratings were, at every stage of the 2019 campaign, substantially worse than Theresa May’s at the same stage of the 2017 campaign. Johnson was a polariser, not a unifier.
Even the much-lauded victories in the “red wall” owed as much to May’s toil as Johnson’s charisma - most of these seats were only winnable thanks to the large rise in Conservative voting May achieved, which in many cases ended up being much bigger than the boost accomplished under Boris.
Throughout the long Tory leadership battles of this year, Johnson’s most ardent supporters have regularly insisted that, despite his flaws, the 2019 election proved their man had a unique popular appeal that would prove impossible to replicate. That wasn’t true then, and it certainly isn’t true now.
Graph: Johnson in 2019 (solid blue line) was less popular than May (dashed blue line) at the same point in 2017. But 2019-edition Jeremy Corbyn (solid red line) was toxic, unlike 2017-edition Jeremy Corbyn (dashed red line)
A Brexit election, but not just a Brexit election
“Get Brexit Done” was rightly hailed as a brilliant election slogan. But no election turns on a single pledge, even on an issue as deep and divisive as Brexit. The Leave voters consolidated by May and Johnson did indeed want Brexit “done”, but they also wanted to “Take Back Control”, particularly of immigration. They were also attracted by another promise – we might call it “More Cake Please”: Johnson’s 2019 manifesto offered a bigger boost to public spending than any Conservative government since Harold Macmillan. This, too, was vital for Conservative victory - the voters won in 2017-19 were pro-Brexit and pro-cake - far more so than the Conservative MPs they returned to Westminster.
These voters were never likely to be excited by the promises of “Brittania Unbound” or “Singapore on Thames” that delighted Conservative members, as Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng discovered in their short and disastrous tenure. To restore market confidence shredded by that brief holiday from reality, the current government has decided it must reboot the Coalition era austerity agenda. Austerity was never popular, but in the Coalition years was at least seen as a painful but necessary corrective to past Labour excesses. Now there is nowhere to shift the blame for the pain. Cake and Brexit helped Johnson conjure the impression that a new government was being elected in 2019. With no cake to offer, and no Brexit deal to sell, it is unlikely the current Conservative government will be able to pull this trick off again.
Corbyn cost votes
It is not just Boris boosters who hanker after a king over the water. Even on election night, Jeremy Corbyn’s defenders on the Labour left were insisting the result was an endorsement of Brexit, not a rejection of Corbynism. While many of Labour’s radical ideas were indeed popular in isolation, voters were not impressed with the overall package, or with its salesman. Labour’s “go large” 2019 manifesto was rejected as too expensive and impossible to deliver. Corbyn himself, weighed down by two years of constant controversy, was an asset only for his opponents.
While cake and Brexit were crucial on one side of the Brexit divide – helping the Conservatives consolidate Leave voters – the threat of Corbyn was decisive on the other side – helping the Conservatives to hold on to more moderate, middle class Remain voters with no love for the Johnson agenda. In 2019, Tory Remainers consistently and by large margins said they feared a Corbyn government more than a Johnson Brexit. Replacing Corbyn with the bland but unthreatening Keir Starmer has removed this “fear factor” that kept unhappy voters in the Conservative coalition for fear of worse. The results have been clear to see - as three Conservative governments have flounded in 2022, Labour’s standing in the polls has soared to heights not seen since the mid-1990s.
The last election was not just about the “red wall”
The Conservatives’ victory in seats which had backed Labour for generations, epitomised by the early gain of the North East former mining seat of Blyth Valley (Labour since 1931), was the headline story of election night three years ago. We have been hearing about the “red wall” ever since, as London based reporters head off on regular treks to shove microphones into pensioners’ faces on Northern highstreets, while pollsters and analysts offer up their thoughts on how the “red wall voter” might react to the latest soundbyte or policy initiative.
The red wall did matter. But it wasn’t the only thing that mattered. The 2019 election, like all elections, was fought and won on multiple fronts. Traditional marginals mattered. Stasis in Scotland mattered. The Liberal Democrats falling short, despite often huge swings, in the Home Counties mattered. All of these fronts will matter again next time. Gains in Glasgow or Milton Keynes will contribute just as much to a Labour return to office as gains in Grimsby or South Shields. The Conservatives, in particular, face challenges across widely different kinds of seats up and down the country. The red wall grabs all the attention, but it is just one small part of a big and complicated electoral map.
A lot is still up for grabs
People who devote hours a day to politics are not normal. For many voters, politics is a background hum, largely ignored away from elections. As we saw in 2017, initial impressions of party leaders formed in such circumstances are shallow and can change fast. The next election, like the 2017 election, will be fought by two leaders who have not previously taken their case to voters in an election campaign. That presents risks and opportunities for both – do not assume that the firm impressions of the highly engaged will be shared by voters seeing leaders with fresh eyes.
Every campaign is also a battle to define the choice facing voters. The Conservatives fell short in 2017 when Labour successfully reframed an election called over Brexit as a referendum on austerity, and prevailed in 2019 by pledging to reject austerity and endorse Brexit. Labour seem determined to keep Brexit off the ballot next time, despite growing public dissatisfaction with life outside the EU, but what replaces it as the centre of attention remains up for grabs. Two huge global crises have already rocked the nation and the world in the three years of this Parliament, and there is still a lot of time left on the clock.
Whatever comes next, though, there are more voters in play than ever. Traditional partisan alignments have been fading for decades, and the Leave and Remain tribal attachments forged in 2016 may also be losing their hold with Brexit off the agenda. Two of the three most volatile elections in modern history have come in the past decade, with almost half of voters switching sides at least once between 2010-17. The past year has been a wild ride in the polls and in politics. There will be plenty more twists and turns to come between now and the next exit poll.