Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are facing their worst ever result at the general election and could be left with just 130 seats, according to Professor Sir John Curtice.
The country’s top polling guru warned of the bleak situation faced by the Tories as they head into winter with the news dominated by infighting over the prime minister’s Rwanda deportation plan.
The “shy Tories” may yet hold the balance of power. Most of those "don’t know"s and even a few professed Labour voters may well stow their votes with the Conservatives when it’s only them and God in the voting booth. They just don’t want to admit it to a human poll taker.
Edit: added end quote.
My fear. Polls are kinda meaningless nowadays.
I just fail to understand what sort of person views the last 14 years as anything but a series of disasters?!
We’ve gotten very bad at voting. It’s not just the British, if that’s any comfort. It isn’t any comfort.
Sometimes I wonder if voting should be mandatory, like in Australia… but forcing everyone to vote doesn’t at all solve the problem of how so much of our news media is going out of their way to mislead and manipulate the voting public. Might even make things worse.
I keep seeing people whingeing about Starmer, saying they’ll never vote for him, then you get several comments down the chain and they let slip that they don’t actually bother to vote anyway. Madness.
Not to mention that despite mandatory voting, Australia has managed to have Scotty From Marketing, then the next election a party who’s entire policy could be summed up with “at least we’re not the last guy”
Exactly, the reason for my concern over mandatory voting. Also it has ‘tory’ in the word and who knows, it might Derren Brown some people into voting for them!
I didn’t used to vote when I was in my 20’s. At the time I didn’t listen to the news or watch TV. I didn’t vote because I had no idea who to vote for. Totally disconnected. It seemed a bit wrong to vote on something I know little about so I would choose not to.
If voting was mandatory it wouldn’t have changed my lack of interest or knowledge.
Thankfully I’m more engaged these days but I think there’s a lot of people out there who aren’t.
Imo a key problem we need to try and counter (as a society) is voter apathy. A lot of people just don’t care, or don’t have the energy after a long day’s work to invest in sifting through political bullshit for the nuggets of true info (understandable). Some people even take pride in their lack of interest which to me is like being proud of being stupid.
Politics affects pretty much every aspect of our lives. It drives me nuts when people whinge and whinge about the state of the country but won’t engage one iota with the process of improving things.
Well, the tories were voted in before, during and after Brexit, so… yeah…
Don’t you see, you fool?! They needed to get brexit done!
… is it done yet? The most frustrating thing about brexit for me was, it didn’t have to be this intransigent, ludicrous, adamantium-hard brexit. They could’ve met the ‘will of the people’ and still kept some of the benefits of a close relationship with the EU. But no, they fucked it up like they’ve fucked up prisons; courts; probation; energy markets; water; environment; immigration; education; healthcare… I could go on but my fingers are getting tired.
The shy Tory phenomenon was always overstated and hasn’t showed up in the polling in decades. A lot of current “Don’t Knows” did vote Tory in 2019 but, if you look at the polling and focus groups of the DKs, they are furious with this government, can’t name anything good they’ve done, and can’t name anything that would win them back. Some of those DKs will split Tory anyway, but some will split to other parties or stay at home.
But we can’t be complacent. The trouble is that none of the other parties is popular or trusted (not even the SNP anymore). It’s just that the Tories are even less trusted. It’s not DKs switching to Tories that should worry us; it’s that people who really want the Tories out don’t vote at all because the alternatives aren’t sufficiently appealling.