Ed Davy takes a dip but are the LibDems about to surge?

Meanwhile Nigel Farage makes a splash and the Conservatives find themselves up a certain creek without a paddle

The 4th July is busy this year.  It is Independence Day, my wedding anniversary (I appreciate the irony), my mother’s birthday and now the UK General Election.  With less than a month to go, things are getting interesting for us geeks that like getting their hands on polling data.

This week we have had two massive polls from YouGov and Survation using an MRP methodology.  MRP stands for Multi-level Regression and Post-stratification and uses much larger samples than a traditional poll (60k and 30k respectively) to allow a breakdown by socio-demographic groups which is then used to model how voters are likely to act at a constituency level.

This is important as in a first-past-the-post voting system like the UK, the voting share that you can assess from a national poll does not always translate into the number of real MPs that get voted into parliament. For example in the 2015 election the anti European Union UKIP party was the third largest party by votes cast with almost 4 million, but only gained a single MP.  It could be argued that UKIP’s high poll rating spooked David Cameron to committing to the Brexit Referendum with all of the consequences that followed.

Both polls came out on the same day this week as Nigel Farage who led UKIP’s surge in 2015, summoned the Westminster press pack to announce his return as leader of the Reform party and inject some excitement to what he called the “most boring election ever”.

Farage clearly likes the attention but he is also good at getting it.  In a short election campaign, the challenge for all parties is how to cut through.  Farage is very effective at exploiting the competitiveness of rolling-TV and digital media – emphasising hyperbolic language, simple messages, and a focus on getting an instinctive emotional response rather than getting drawn into a more forensic debate.

The late great Nobel-winning psychologist and founder of behavioural economics Daniel Kahneman, showed that humans are more emotional and less rational than we (and traditional economic theory) may think we are.  We have cognitive biases which can and are being used by the political, media and big-tech classes for more attention and engagement, including:

• Loss aversion – looking back with nostalgia to a better past that we fear is being lost
• Availability bias – using emotive examples like migrants in boats when they are a small percentage of overall net migration numbers
• Negativity bias – paying more attention to things that are going wrong than things that are going right (in newspaper terms “if it bleeds it leads”)
• Ingroup bias – having an instinctive aversion to people and ideas outside of our perceived group (the left, the right, other countries, the ‘elite’, migrants, other religions).

Despite spending less money than other parties Reform has been getting more interactions on Facebook than any other official party posts.

Other parties have been targeting content at specific audiences via Facebook, X, Instagram and increasingly TikTok.   The BBC’s latest Media Show had an excellent panel session on whether this is the TikTok Election.  While there are some attempts at making serious policy points, short-form video encourages a more meme-style negative campaigning, as can be seen by the many parodies of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak…“surprise surprise…”

Meanwhile Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey is resorting to a series of publicity stunts to get attention, from falling off a paddleboard five times on Lake Windermere to plunging down waterslides.  He is facing accusations of acting like a clown and not taking things seriously, but he argues that he first needs to get the attention and then he can use that to raise the important issues.

And Ed may have the last laugh.  Much of the focus on this week has been on Reform and Nigel Farage and the existential effect they could have on the Conservative party, but first-past-the-post is brutal.  There is a possibility that Reform will get a greater vote share than the Conservatives, but realistically they could only win three seats and could end up with none.

The Liberal Democrats on the other hand, with careful targeting of seats, are fighting are war on the Conservatives’ other flank.  There are 80 seats that were won by the Conservatives in the 2019 election where the Liberal Democrats came 2nd and 22 of them have a majority of less than 10k.

The YouGov and Survation MRP polls have a projection of 48 and 43 seats respectively with both models showing the Liberal Democrats as the 3rd largest party, with the resulting media attention and political capital that brings.

The fieldwork for both MRP polls were done before the Farage announcement and there will be more polls over the next two weeks, so we will see how things develop.  It looks like a Labour landslide and Conservative wipeout is now baked in but the question will be the scale of both and the likely makeup of the other parties when polling answers turn into real votes and votes elect MPs.