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Three words won this election for the Conservatives. Get Brexit Done. That is the main finding from research by J.L. Partners and UnHerd on how and why people voted yesterday.
We asked a representative sample of 2,000 voters on the day of the election how they had voted and why. Of those who said they voted Conservative, 85% put ‘to get Brexit done’ in their top three reasons. That was also the choice of almost nine in 10 of the people who voted Conservative for the first time yesterday.
How was this message so successful, when only two years ago, another three-word slogan, “strong and stable”, helped deprive Theresa May of her majority? The differentiating factor is that it was not a phrase cooked up by some grand strategist — but one that came straight from the public themselves. It was not an enthusiastic call to arms for Brexit, but instead a tired longing for closure. It was the refrain of people up and down the country, desperate for the EU infighting to stop and for proper issues to be given attention once more.
I have heard the phrase repeatedly in focus groups from as far back as January, when I was in Downing Street. But the unfortunate truth was that when Theresa May said “get Brexit done”, MPs thought she was trying to brush the detail under the carpet. An apparently true believer such as Boris Johnson could embrace the phrase with no problem at all.
More than a saying, though, it was also a quiet thought in the back of voters’ minds. The power of this latent thought is what most probably explains why the narrowing we saw in the polls in the final week did not come to fruition. People may have been talking about public services and the NHS in the last few days, but when it came to putting the cross in the box, they were thinking about putting an end to the Brexit process. And if public services were on their mind, it was in the context of the Conservative Party’s message: they can only be improved if you get Brexit out of the way first.
Of course, the election was not all about leaving the European Union. Focus groups throughout the campaign consistently showed Jeremy Corbyn to be toxic for the working-class voters who abandoned Labour in droves. He may have won them over in 2017, but he went into this contest as a much better known quantity. Crucially, anti-Semitism cut through in a way it hasn’t before: of direct switchers from Labour to the Conservatives in our poll, almost one in five cited Labour’s anti-Semitism problem as an important factor in deciding their vote.
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