High Peak Liberal Democrats

The weirdest poll finding from 2017, or how not to do political messaging

I am going to give you some polling figures about two different policy areas. One was in the headlines regularly during the 2017 general election, and indeed previous elections too. It is a policy area credited with a large part in boosting the popularity of one party and with explaining the struggles of another party. That credit/blame allocation is so widely shared by people from all points of the political spectrum that it is conventional wisdom even amongst unconventional pundits.

The other policy area is best known for being an example of a topic that some political activists get excited about but which the public is unmoved by. It rarely gets many headlines at a general election and was almost completely absent from the scene in 2017. For one brief period a few years back it got headlines for a while and was notable for not exciting the public when it did.

These two paragraphs are, of course, the setup for a trick question that is easy to see through. Which of these two issues scored most highly when the public was asked to select four or five issues that Britain should prioritise in the next few years?

The first gets mentioned by 28% of young people and the second gets mentioned by 27% of pensioners. The second gets mentioned by only 14% of young people and also scores 14% amongst pensioners. In other words, in each age group both the issues are seen as important as each other.

The names of them? Tuition fees and electoral reform. Yes, tuition fees and electoral reform are weirdly seen as important as each other. (Fuller data here.)

It's a great example of the complex relationship between having popular policies and securing more votes. Most often, it isn't the policy itself that wins or loses support but rather what the policy says about the party (or leader) more generally - are they on your side, are they competent, do they care about the things you care about and so on? Labour's policy on tuition fees, despite being a policy that benefits better off young people rather than the least well off, hit the right general notes: a policy about the future, about giving people opportunities, about understanding the worries people have.

Although technically electoral reform is considered as important an issue to address, highlighting it in the same way would have been, I strongly suspect, massively less successful - because the wider points it would have highlighted would have been more about being seen off at a tangent from the main concerns people have, not addressing the pressures they face, being about politicians wanting to get one over on other politicians and so on.

That's a challenge for electoral reformers to address (in brief, they need to go along the same sort of road which climate campaigners have gone along to understand how to frame their case in a way that works with where public opinion is starting).

It's also a warning against the view of political messaging as being about creating a bundle of policies, polling them individually and creating a pick'n'mix of those which individually come out best. That then leaves it a matter of luck as to whether it adds up to a coherent and successful package or not. The smarter approach is to work backwards from the bigger picture to policies which illustrate it, as Jim Williams and I set out in Reinventing the Liberal Democrats.

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