Ever since the shock win for the Lib Dems in Chesham and Amersham back in June, many on the centre-Left have been waiting for something equally arresting to confirm that it wasn’t a one off, and that the Tories might be in as much trouble in some of their southern heartlands as Labour are in the north.

But is YouGov’s eye-catching Blue Wall poll really that other shoe dropping? And even if it is, isn’t it more a faint echo than a darn great thud?

That the Conservatives are losing support in some of their seats which heavily backed Remain in 2016, and where over a quarter of residents hold a university degree, actually shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

After all, the flip side of the electoral analyst James Kanagasooriam’s observation that there were Labour seats where voter demographics (and values) meant they could easily turn Tory was always that the Conservatives should expect to lose a few seats, too. In fact, one could almost argue that it was always going to be a matter of when, not if.

It could even be that Covid is speeding the process up. The Government’s recent responses to both the ping- and pandemic have once again given people the impression that (a) it doesn’t really know what it’s doing, and (b) there’s one rule for it and one for the rest of us. Added to which, the search for space among relatively affluent city dwellers may be leading to the surrounding outer suburbs and small towns welcoming younger, better-educated and more socially liberal voters

Chesham and Amersham may be just the kind of constituency they are moving to. But if that formerly true-blue stronghold is in play, then so are a bunch of home-counties seats, although most of those are rather more vulnerable to the Lib Dems than to Labour.

Which is why it may be a little disappointing to those investing in YouGov’s latest polling to find that, at least in the seats it surveyed, support for the Lib Dems appears to have dropped (from 24% down to 18%) since the general election. If he does want take more Blue Wall seats off the Tories in 2023 or 2024, then Ed Davey is going to need a much bigger orange mallet than the one he wielded for the rather endearing photo-op that celebrated his party’s win in Chesham and Amersham.

Suggested reading

Will Boris lose the Blue Wall?

By Tanya Gold

Labour appears to be doing better, with its support rising four points from 20% to 24%. But if you’re excited about those numbers, then it probably says more about you than it does about them. A score of 20% doesn’t even merit the label “low base”. It wouldn’t even come close to what the party would need to pull off an unlikely victory in a classic three-way marginal. In 2019, there were just 11 English seats which had a vote-share gap between first and third place of less than 20 percentage points, and even among those the lowest winning vote share (Labour’s in Sheffield Hallam) was 34.6%.

To be fair, YouGov reckons that: “If the swings were uniform across all constituencies, Labour would be set to gain a total of nine Blue Wall seats, and the Liberal Democrats three.” However, if you look carefully, four of those Labour wins would be in London (Chipping Barnet, Chingford, Hendon and Kensington) and only one (Wycombe) is in what most analysts would think of as the “real” Blue Wall (the others being Milton Keynes North, Stroud, Truro and Falmouth, and one of the Bristol seats).

And anyway, as YouGov goes on in the next breath, even if Labour were to gain the seats listed, “it would not be anywhere near enough to offset the party’s losses in the so-called Red Wall in 2019”. The fact remains, as Keir Starmer’s new Director of Strategy, Deborah Mattinson (whose book does a great job of helping to explain those losses) has reportedly told Labour MPs: the party still has a long way to go if it is to win over the older, less-educated, and culturally conservative voters it desperately needs to get back in order to stand a chance next time round.

Apparently, she also pointed to polling and to focus group research, in which she specialises, that suggests support for Boris Johnson is waning. It’s also worth remembering that, at the end of last year, before the vaccine roll-out became a reality for most people, the gap between the two parties had narrowed. But even as the nation’s gratitude begins to fade, it remains the case that, nationwide, both the PM and the Conservative Party retain significant leads on the measures that matter — trust on who would best run the economy and who would make the best prime minister.

Suggested reading

Don't stereotype Red Wall Tories, Boris

By David Jeffreys

Sure, there are some worrying numbers for the Tories in the YouGov poll. Some 54% of its Blue Wall respondents disapprove of the Government (the same proportion who say it doesn’t listen to people in their area) – and that’s compared to only 30% who approve. Moreover, 47% think the Government is taking the country in the wrong direction compared to just 32% who reckon it’s taking us in the right direction.

Furthermore, some of the Blue Wall’s decidedly liberal views on cultural questions (for instance, 66% of voters polled by YouGov agree that a wide variety of different ethnic backgrounds and cultures is part of British culture compared to 50% of voters in general and 54% in the Red Wall) might give the Government pause for thought about upping the ante on its ongoing war on woke.

More generally, the fact that 55% think the Conservative Party is out of touch is hardly good news for Boris Johnson — until, that is, you realise that 58% say the same of the Labour Party. And Lib Dems shouldn’t read too much into the fact their score on that metric is 39%: a mere 18% say that they’re in touch.

Ultimately, though, most Conservatives — except perhaps those southern Nimby MPs desperate for ammunition in their battle to prevent their government carrying through meaningful planning reform — won’t (or at least shouldn’t) get too worked up about what the poll purports to tell us about the Blue Wall. This is mid-term: they should expect some serious discontent and dissatisfaction.

In any case, a drop from 52% support in 2019 to 44% support now can be made to sound steep but ultimately, in most of their heartland seats anyway, the worse that’s likely to happen to Tory candidates at the next general election is that they end up having to count the votes rather than simply weigh them.

For the pro-Trump rioters who ransacked the Capitol this month, the bogus claim that the election was stolen remains at the heart of their belief system. But surely this isn’t the majority view among the 76 million Trump voters? Actually, it appears it is. Republican voters really believe their man won. Take, for example, a recent Data for Progress poll which offered respondents three choices: “I trust the election results and believe Biden should be inaugurated”, “I have some doubts about the election results, but believe Biden should be inaugurated”, and “I don’t believe Biden should be inaugurated”.

Of the 463 Republicans sampled, only 16% said Biden won cleanly, while 29% claimed he won despite some irregularities. Meanwhile, 49% replied that Biden should not be inaugurated. If we screen out the 6% who said that they didn’t know, this means that over half of Republicans think the election was stolen.

Suggested reading

Impeachment is more dangerous than Trump

By Michael Tracey

When I conducted my own poll of almost 400 Trump supporters two days after the Capitol was stormed – using Prolific, an online survey platform – the results were much the same. I asked “Which statement comes closest to your view of what happened in the 2020 election?”. The answers, with emphasis added, were as follows:

• Trump lost to Biden fair and square: [17%]
• Trump almost certainly lost to Biden, but it would have been closer without rule violations that helped Biden: [13%]
• Trump probably lost to Biden, but it would have been closer without rule violations that helped Biden: [19%]
• Trump would have got more votes than Biden without the rule violations that helped Biden: [51%]

Even with my attempts to tease out a nuanced response, a majority of Trump voters echoed Trump’s conspiracy theory that the election was fraudulent. And surely it is a conspiracy theory. While none of us was there to count each ballot, I trust the US legal system, electoral process and the social science of election fraud more than hearsay. The same, however, cannot be said for Trump’s supporters, whose trust in the electoral process appears to have frayed. It’s a result, I suspect, of the wider social disconnect between voters and elites that both Michael Lind and Robert Putnam link to the demise of mass-membership associations such as unions and churches. They used to give people a rooted social connection to national political institutions, a phenomenon which since the 1960s has faded.

More from this author

Who are the real Shy Trumpers?

By Eric Kaufmann

Does this mean that Trump supporters are putty in his hands, devoted to a cult figure? Not necessarily. If they were, they would enthusiastically support him running for president in 2024. It would be a chance for their stabbed-in-the-back leader to redeem himself. But when I asked my Trump-voting sample, “What is your preferred vision for the Republican Party’s future?”, they were decidedly cool on Trump when compared to a hypothetical Trumpist politician with more respect for liberal democracy:

• Donald Trump runs again in 2024: [29%]
• A candidate who is more presidential, respectful and gets things done, while adopting Trump’s views on controlling immigration, nationalism and being willing to challenge the mainstream media, political correctness and elites: [55%]
• A candidate who is more presidential, respectful and gets things done, and avoids Trump’s views to focus on older Republican arguments like limited government, free markets, the family and resisting tyranny in the world: [16%]

All of which suggests that there is certainly room for a Republican candidate who can articulate the so-called “left-conservative” populist views espoused by anti-Trump intellectuals such as Andrew Sullivan and David Frum. Meanwhile, support for a candidate espousing the post-Reagan “fusionist” Republicanism of tax cuts, family values and promoting democracy garnered a paltry 16%.

Suggested reading

Donald Trump's ruinous legacy

By Michael Tracey

And so the hope for a return to the ideological status quo in American politics appears a vain one. As the below table — which compares the results of my two questions — reveals, even among those who accept that Biden won fair and square, a respectable Trumpist candidate beats the fusionist conservative 53-35. On the other side, moreover, even the die-hards who say that Trump won narrowly prefer a Trumpist over the man himself. In fact, the Trumpist always comes out on top.

Source: Prolific, January 8, 2020. N=393.

What this shows is that while a cultish devotion to Trump’s charismatic authority is important, it is secondary to the mainly cultural grievances — such as the policing of speech — which provided his 2016 election with an impetus. A skillful politician who fights back intelligently but unapologetically on these issues, while respecting democracy and procedural liberalism, has a serious chance of emerging as the next Republican presidential candidate. And though Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton will no doubt be leading figures jockeying for that mantle, we shouldn’t neglect the possibility that an outsider may ride into town once again.

The truth, though, is rather more mundane. Good quality opinion polls are the best — indeed, the only — real datapoint for quantitatively estimating the outcome of an election before it has happened. They’re obviously not perfect, but they’re the best information we have. Whatever you may hear to the contrary, the political betting markets are mainly a measure of the consensus view of politically engaged middle-aged blokes, who in turn calibrate their hunch against… opinion polls.

There are clear incentives for pollsters to get it right — but they aren’t stated often enough. For most of these companies, the political work is a loss-leader, a kind of shop window for how accurate they are so they can make their real money selling brand trackers to McDonalds or whatever. They join in at election time to prove that their method works, that the numbers they give you about your business demonstrably correspond to what the population really thinks. As far as evil masterplans go, pushing an agenda by putting out dodgy election poll numbers is a terrible one — because unlike the pundits, who can couch their analysis in noncommittal theoreticals, you will be found out on election day.

I’ve been closely involved in pollster world for most of the past ten years and have developed a sort of broad brush heuristic for thinking about the polling evidence. First, only pay attention to the good quality pollsters — in most elections, there’s usually a surprising “random pollster that called it right last time” but more often than not they don’t pull off the same trick twice. Second, don’t bet the house on differences of one or two percentage points — presume that even the best pollsters will be a little bit wrong. Third, pay particular attention to the in-house pollster “MRP” models, of which the most robust is from YouGov (where I used to work).

Once you’ve got the big picture of what the data is saying, compare it with the media narrative. This, in betting terms, is where the “value” lies. Given that the polls won’t be exactly right, does the consensus seem overly invested in small poll differences, or insufficiently convinced by large ones? In the turbulent past five years of politics, there have been upsets in both of these directions.

Further reading

What's your vote really worth?

By Tom Chivers

In the UK, the General Election of 2015 was a gruesome event for most pollsters – most had it near-even between Ed Miliband’s Labour and David Cameron’s Tories, but Cameron went on to win an overall majority, thanks to the Labour collapse in Scotland and the Lib Dem collapse in England. It was, at the time, the most-polled election in history, and the media were furious they had given the numbers so much air-time and had missed the real story.

So when the Brexit referendum came around in May 2016, they were determined not to make the same mistake twice. Despite many polls showing a very close race, there was a deeply-held superstition, sustained by the betting markets, financial markets and media, that people would ‘see sense’ at the last moment and vote to Remain (as they had in the Scottish referendum in 2014). In the run up to the Brexit vote I wrote with frustration in The Times, the Guardian and Newsweek about this mysterious overconfidence, and how it wasn’t borne out by the data.

From the same author

Is Donald Trump toast?

By Freddie Sayers

The Trump victory over Hillary Clinton later that year was a strange combination of both effects. The polls were slightly wrong, and some of the state polls very wrong, but overall they showed a close race. Had we purely gone on the data, with the appropriate humility that with such a novel candidate attracting a novel electorate the polls would likely be additionally off, the possibility of a narrow Trump victory across the battleground states should not have seemed remote at all.

Donald Trump is not a novel candidate any more, he’s the President; and there’s certainly nothing novel about Joe Biden. It was a volatile campaign in 2016, with a high number of undecideds and high third party support; 2020 is none of these things. The main technical error in 2016 — higher turnout among demographic groups that don’t normally vote in such number — has now been corrected by most pollsters. The much-quoted ‘shy Trump’ phenomenon remains unproven, and when we spoke to Robert Cahaly, its main advocate, he couldn’t explain convincingly how it could be measured. For it to be a serious effect, you would have expected Trump in 2016 to have overperformed in Democratic areas where it was most shameful to support him, but that is not what happened. Plus, the midterm polls in 2018 were already demonstrably better.

Since the pollsters are collectively terrified of repeating the errors of last presidential cycle, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had over-compensated in their adjustments and we end up finding they have been over-estimating the Trump vote. Nobody wants to be the pollster predicting a massive Biden landslide right now: if there’s any “adjustment of the weights” going on it is more likely to be softening the Biden lead into safer single digits.

Further reading

Of course Trump can win

By Matthew Goodwin

One clear indication of this reverse effect would be if Texas goes blue. Joe Biden doesn’t need to win it, but the polls are tantalisingly close, though moving slightly in Trump’s favour in the final week. In Democrat circles the possibility of winning Texas is mentioned with a whisper, as if to speak it out loud will jinx the possibility. It feels unlikely, like it somehow can’t happen, but the data says it is possible. This would put Biden in historic landslide territory.

More broadly, Biden’s advantage in the polls on election day – a 7-9 point national lead, and apparently ahead in almost all of the battleground states — equates to a much more comfortable margin than Hillary Clinton had. Biden has roughly double the lead in the top battlegrounds, double the national lead and double the favourability advantage of Clinton in 2016. If the same degree of polling error that afflicted 2016 was applied here, Biden would still win comfortably.

All of this is why I believe it is reasonable to expect that Joe Biden will win the election by a comfortable margin, possibly a very big one. Put another way: if Donald Trump does pull off another surprise and wins re-election, fair and square, it would be an astonishing event. It would mean that the mechanism we have relied on for assessing public opinion for decades — a key part of the way governments decide on public policy, most recently on Covid-19 — is fundamentally broken. It would mean we have to rethink the basic epistemic foundation of our public conversation. It would be scintillating — so much so that I wouldn’t give a moment’s thought to those bets I placed on a big Biden victory. There’d be far more important things to worry about.

I was particularly inspired by a recent post on the subject from Robert Wiblin of the effective altruism charity 80,000 Hours, who helped me understand a few things.

First, it’s unlikely that your vote will be the one that, on its own, changes the course of an election. It will probably not turn a win into a tie or a tie into a win. That’s because millions of votes are cast. 

If there were only 10 people voting as well as you, then there would be 1,024 possible different ways the 10 of them could vote, of which about 250 would be a 5-5 tie that you could break. So – assuming all the other voters were equally likely to vote A or B – there would be about a 25% chance that your vote would make the critical difference. If you go up to 100 other voters, it becomes about an 8% chance.

Of course, you can’t be the actual tiebreaking vote in the US election, because it’s not decided on the popular vote. But you could break the tie in a single state which then goes on to break the tie in the electoral college.

But how likely is that? On the face of it, not very. Even the smallest US state, Wyoming, has over 200,000 registered voters; most have millions. The odds of breaking the tie in one state is small: even in Wyoming (and even assuming other voters were equally likely to vote for either party, which they are definitely not; it is one of the safest Republican states, voting 67% Trump in 2016), then it would be less than one in 500. 

And even if you are the one who breaks the tie in that state, that state then has to be the one to break a tie in the electoral college for your vote to affect the overall outcome, and since there are 50 states and the smaller ones have less influence, the odds of your Wyoming vote being the tiebreaker are commensurately tinier.

So that might sound like your vote is essentially meaningless. But it’s a bit more complicated than that, for two reasons. One, not all states are equally likely to be tied, or to be tiebreakers; and two, the value of a vote is determined not just by how likely it is to have an effect, but by how big that effect will be.

The statistician Andrew Gelman’s model suggests that there is about a one in 7.7 million chance that a voter in Pennsylvania could swing the election, because it is a reasonably big state that is likely to be close. A voter in Wisconsin has about the same chance; a voter in Nevada, about one in 12 million. Meanwhile, very safe states – such as the aforementioned Wyoming, or California – are very unlikely: one chance in many billions. So if you live in a swing state, your chances of deciding the election are thousands of times higher than in safe ones. 

Suggested reading

How hysterical punditry failed America

By Michael Tracey

Wiblin raises an interesting aside, by the way. You might be thinking “Hang on, there’s no way that a state is really decided by a single vote. If it’s that close, there’ll be court battles about recounts and so on.” And that’s true.

If vote-counting were absolutely perfect, and we knew down to the exact one how many had voted A or B, then candidate A would have 0% chance of winning if they had one vote less than their opponent, and a 100% chance of winning if they had one vote more. But given that counting isn’t perfect, then it’s not quite as clear as that.

If the count finds that one candidate in a swing state has won by a single vote, it’s almost certainly going to be challenged in the courts, and that challenge might be successful. If that candidate is found to have won by 100 votes, the challenge is that much less likely to work. If it’s 1,000 votes, it’ll be less likely still. If it’s 10,000, there might not be a challenge at all. A vote for a candidate in that situation doesn’t instantly tip a result from win to loss, but it might make some small difference to the chance that the result will be challenged and overturned in the courts.

So instead of having a one in 7.7 million chance of being the tipping vote, a Pennsylvania voter might have a somewhat larger chance of helping to avoid a recount or to make their side more likely to win that recount, which then translates into the same one in 7.7 million chance of affecting the election overall.

Still, though, one in 7.7 million doesn’t sound very much. But that’s where we have to introduce our second point, how much the outcome matters. What matters is not just the likelihood, but the likelihood times the outcome. Here, I need to bring in the idea of expected value. 

Expected value is a concept from probability theory. Imagine we were playing a game of dice. We roll a die: on a score of one to five, you give me a pound; on a score of six, I give you £10. Should you take that bet? You’re probably going to lose, after all. But if we played six times, on average, you would lose £5 and win £10, for a total gain of £5. My expected value for each roll, therefore, is £5 divided by six, or 83p. I can’t actually win 83p on any single roll, but if I did it a million times, that’s what I’d expect on average. So the bet is a good one.

Let’s say, then, you’re in Pennsylvania, and you’ve got your one in 7.7 million chance of being the magic vote. How can we work out the expected value of your vote?

The obvious thing to look at would be the overall spend of the United States government. In the 2019 financial year, the US government spent $4.45 trillion. Over four years, that’s nearly $18 trillion, or about $130,000 for each American who voted in 2016. If it was as simple as “If the candidate you want gets in, he will spend that $18 trillion on good things; if the other one does, he will spend it on bad things,” then the expected value of a one in 7.7 million chance of directing $18 trillion is pretty huge. It would be the equivalent of being in charge of a nearly $2,400,000 budget. Even if you lived in California and had only a one in 9.4 billion chance of being the deciding vote, that is an expected value of nearly $2,000.

Suggested reading

Of course Trump can win

By Matthew Goodwin

Of course, that’s not what actually happens. The bulk of the spending is already locked in, on social security, Medicare and Medicaid, road maintenance, interest on the public debt, things like that. 

And under the US system, presidents have surprisingly little power. Wiblin points out that last year, in the UK, the hung parliament meant that Theresa May’s government struggled to pass its agenda, and that this was really weird and unusual and the situation was rectified with an election. But in the US, it’s often true that the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency are split between parties, they stymie each other, and nothing very much gets done.

Still, the Trump administration, although in general (as I understand it) a legislative and policy failure, did manage to get a tax cut passed in 2017 which the Congressional Budget Office estimates lowered federal revenues by about $300 billion in 2018. That’s about 8% of the total revenue that year. More generally, presidents have huge power over foreign policy – they can decide whether to go to war, for a start, and the war in Iraq cost trillions of dollars. I think it’s pretty reasonable to think that a choice of president could affect a single-digits percentage of total US government spending. If we say 5%, and that you’re a Pennsylvania voter, then your vote probably has an expected value of about $120,000. (If you’re a California voter, on the other hand, it’s probably only about $100.)

There are harder-to-quantify non-budgetary values as well, of course. Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, says a lot of untrue things. If you think that his constant lies and misinformation are corrosive to public debate, you might feel that has some value that is difficult to assess in dollar terms. Similarly, he is a destabilising influence on the world order, threatening to remove the USA from international bodies like the WHO and Nato and undermining international cooperation; whether you think that’s a good or a bad thing depends on how you value the world order, but either way, again, it’s a difficult thing to price. 

Also, while – I’m surprised to learn – fewer immigrants have been deported per year under his presidency than under Obama’s, the administration has upped the rhetoric on immigration, and introduced a blanket policy of the separation of migrant children from their parents (separation did happen under Obama/Biden, but in rare cases, not as a general policy). Whether you approve or disapprove – the latter seems bafflingly cruel to me – you’ll want to assign some value to voting for it.

It’s not that you can’t put a dollar value on these things – you absolutely can, just as people can put a value on a year of human life (between $50,000 and $150,000 in the US, apparently). But it’s much harder, and would involve a much longer piece than this. I’d be happy saying they add significantly to the value of a vote; whatever value you give them, the same calculations about the likelihood of that vote having an impact apply.

But these hard-to-quantify values bring us to the third point: how confident are you – or should you be – in your decision? For instance, I would have probably bet that there were more deportations under the Trump administration than under the Obama one, but (as I have just illustrated) I would have been wrong. If I were a single-issue voter who cared solely about the number of deportations, I would have voted exactly the wrong way, if I assumed that a Biden administration would be more like Obama’s than Trump’s. If you are completely uninformed about some policy or other, then your voting will be no more likely than chance to improve the situation.

In general, whichever way you vote, about half of the population will vote the other way. In most situations, if you believe something and half of the world believes the exact opposite, that’s a good reason to pause and wonder how confident you should be in your belief.

Suggested reading

Is QAnon on the brink of power in America?

By Travis View

That said, as Wiblin points out, there are reasons to assume – given that you are reading this – that you are better informed than the median US voter. He quotes Ilya Somin’s 2013 book Democracy and Political Ignorance as saying that less than 40% of US voters knew who controlled the Senate or the House ahead of the 2014 elections, or that the government spends more on social security than on foreign aid. (Which it does, by about 20 times.) Keeping informed about politics is time-consuming and difficult and most people don’t enjoy it. So if you are doing some relatively basic things, like reading about the US election, and know basic things like who your congressional representative is, you are probably better informed than most. Still – if you are, say, 75% confident that you know the best way to vote on some issue, then you should downgrade the value of your vote by 25%.

(I will note that I don’t trust people who claim to be 100% confident in anything.)

There are also ways of improving your confidence that your vote will do what you want it to do. Wiblin points out a very simple one – find a clever friend whose judgment you trust and whose political opinions you largely agree with, and ask them who they would vote for. You can also look up surveys of expert opinion on various matters, such as Chicago Booth’s US Economic Experts Panel.

So: is voting worth it? First – of course, there are other reasons to vote than for cold-eyed estimates of your impact on spending. It communicates your preferences; some people see it as a civic duty; some people just enjoy it. And there are other things to vote for than simply the president: votes for local congressional races, or even votes for local district attorneys or dog-catchers or whatever, have much smaller electorates and so it is more likely that your vote will be the deciding one (although on the flip side, the impact of those outcomes will be smaller).

There are a couple of other considerations, as well. Wiblin points out politicians can ignore demographics that don’t usually vote – young people, for instance. If you are in such a demographic, then simply by raising the percentage of that group which voted, then you will make a small contribution to forcing politicians to pay attention to what that group wants. Something similar applies if your voting in a safe state makes it less safe.

Another, more complex, point is that other people think like you, and your behaviour affects other people’s behaviour. So there’s effectively game of the prisoner’s dilemma going on. If there are five of us voting, and I know that two people will vote A, and I want to vote B, then I won’t bother if I know that the other two are going to stay home. But if they know I’m going to stay home, they won’t bother either. By reliably voting, you make it more valuable for other people to vote. 

But to come back to our original question, if you are thinking in pure numbers terms, then, in short, whether voting is worth it depends on where you live. If you live in Pennsylvania, then your vote probably has about a one in 7.7 million chance of affecting perhaps 5% of US government spending over four years – so it has an expected value of about $120,000. Depending on how confident you are in your ability to pick the right candidate, then your vote could be worth as much as that. Even if it takes, say, two hours to vote (which is apparently a thing), then you are doing $60,000’s worth of good per hour. 

Of course, if you have to spend many hours researching your vote beforehand, that reduces the value accordingly, but unless you value your time extraordinarily highly, then it is probably a good use of your time per hour.

From the same author

The nerd's guide to football

By Tom Chivers

If you live in Kentucky or Wyoming or Oklahoma, though, where the odds of your vote being decisive is more like one in 50 billion, then the calculations are very different. Your vote is probably worth something in the region of $20. I could entirely understand not wanting to spend two hours in the rain, or many hours looking up the impacts of different policy measures, for that. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth it if you see it as a civic duty, but I don’t think you could be reasonably judged for deciding it is not worth your time.

If you’re in one of the in-between states – Colorado, or Alaska, or Ohio, places in the one-in-150-million-ish zone – then you have to decide. The sum I’ve been using is $18 trillion (the total US government budget over four years), multiplied by 0.05 (the percentage I estimate that would be affected by a change in president), divided by the chance that you will cast the deciding vote, as given in Gelman’s model here. The expected value of your vote in those in-between states ends up in the mid-four-figures, usually. Then you need to work out how many hours it will take you to do the research if you need to, and to vote. And if you’re not confident that your vote will help – if you think you’ll just be adding noise to the already noisy system – then you may well decide it’s not worth it. 

If, though, like me, you live in north London, haven’t been to the USA for years, and are in no way a US citizen, then you can’t vote at all. Your opinion, as opposed to your ballot, is worthless and you are paying too much attention to the Americans again. But since you will have elections of your own in your own backwoods country, you might dust this piece off in four year’s time.

In some alternate reality we are all sat on Twitter debating the early ingredients of ‘Johnson-ism’: reform the civil service; ‘level-up’ the regions; launch a new immigration policy; finish phase two of the Brexit negotiations; deliver a bold new budget by Rishi Sunak, the 39-year-old Chancellor who was in the fast-lane to becoming Britain’s first non-white prime minister.

Pretty much all of that has been thrown out of the window. The sudden and shocking outbreak of coronavirus has rightly focused our minds on the fragility of human life. But it also reminds us of the fragility of politics; how entire governments can be suddenly and easily knocked off course by events that are out of their control. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once said that politicians cannot create the current of events — they can only float along and try to steer. But Taylor was talking about the contours of European history not a sudden, global epidemic. The coronavirus looks less like a current than an overwhelming tsunami.

And it is a crisis that will define Johnson’s premiership.

Some Prime Ministers, despite what they might have hoped, are only ever remembered for one thing. Anthony Eden and Suez. Tony Blair and Iraq. David Cameron and Brexit. Theresa May and the same thing.

Like his immediate predecessors, Johnson had also been destined for the Brexit trap before he somehow managed to escape by landing his party a large majority and himself a second chance. But now that door has closed as quickly as it opened. The coronavirus has replaced Brexit as the one thing that will determine how Johnson is remembered.

Further reading

How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

And what impact is the crisis having? Spend time on social media and you might conclude that it is demolishing our new Prime Minister. Ever since the crisis erupted Johnson and his government have been widely criticised for what their critics argue has been a slow and incompetent response. “Johnson says this is war”, reads one column in the Guardian. “But his response to Covid-19 is laughably inadequate”. Others claim that the Prime Minister is “struggling to inspire trust“.

But is this really the case? Or are our partisan biases doing much of the work? Take a dive into the polling and the picture looks rather different. If anything, it’s more positive for Johnson than his critics suggest.

According to the latest political monitor from Ipsos-MORI, which was released this week, amid the height of the panic, Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party have hit 52% in the polls — an increase of 5 percentage points since the last poll in early February. The last time the Conservative Party enjoyed this level of support while being in office was in the autumn of 1987, when Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street, and before that during the Falklands war in 1982.

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Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

As the scale of the crisis has gradually unfolded the Conservatives have opened up a striking 22-point lead over Labour in the polls — again, an increase of 5 percentage points on the party’s lead back in February. In fact, there is really nothing in the polling to suggest a weakening of public support for Johnson and his administration — yet.

Nor is this the only indicator.

Boris Johnson’s own leadership ratings have also increased. When YouGov asked the British people this week whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with the job he is doing as Prime Minister, they handed Johnson a “net satisfaction” rating of +14. This is a significant increase on his negative rating of -20 back in December and +3 in February. In fact, Johnson has never before had a net satisfaction score this strong. His government, too, is seen in a better light; net public satisfaction has risen from -49 back in December to -10 in February and to +7 today.

The polls do hide significant polarisation, of course. Our political identities continue to shape how we see the world around  us. When asked this week whether Johnson’s government is underreacting, overreacting or reacted about right only 38% of all voters felt it was underreacting. But look under the bonnet and you find that while 60% of Conservatives think that the government has reacted ‘about right’, 55% of Labour voters think it has ‘underreacted’.

Similarly, when asked how much confidence they have in the new government to handle the outbreak 77% of Conservatives have a ‘a lot’ or ‘fair amount’ while 60% of Labour voters have ‘very little’ or ‘no’ confidence. Even coronavirus is filtered, at least partly, through our partisan eyes. And, much like coronavirus, a new picture in the polls could arrive suddenly and without warning.

But if the early snapshots of are accurate, and most people are actually responding fairly positively to the Government during this crisis, then what might explain that?

One possible answer, hidden away in political science, is what is known as the ‘rally effect’. When citizens suddenly feel that they and their wider community are under threat from a big external challenge they start to rally round their political leaders or institutions. The classic example are the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, when George W. Bush’s approval ratings rocketed and remained strong for months afterwards. Another took place ten years earlier, when Bush’s father enjoyed a similar boost amid Operation Desert Storm.

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Who will stand by the workers?

By Paul Embery

It is too early to know if Johnson is going to enjoy such an upturn — and the slightest thing, such as his poorly received press conference yesterday could make a difference — but it is worth noting that the coronavirus exhibits all of the hallmarks of something that could produce this kind of reaction. It is external, it poses an existential threat and it has come suddenly, without warning. Johnson is also helped in this by the ineffective and largely leaderless Opposition, which is allowing him to define much of the response.

But it is also not too hard to see how things could go the other way. A more fashionable argument in political science right now is that what ultimately seals the fate of governments is whether or not they are seen as competent during big ‘external shocks’, like the one we are facing today. It is when the country is grappling with unsettling mega-events that people look the hardest for solid, competent leadership. And if they don’t get it then they punish whoever is in charge at the next election.

Look back at the past two decades in British politics and you can see how this played out. It was during the financial crisis when Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and New Labour started to be blamed by voters for managing the economy incompetently and were thrown out.

Then, it was during the big upsurge of immigration when both Labour and the Conservatives were blamed for managing it incompetently, which paved the way for Mr Farage and UKIP. And then, at the 2016 referendum, it was the belief that all of the main parties had managed a succession of these shocks badly — migration, the financial crisis, perhaps also the parliamentary expenses scandal — which found its voice through the vote for Brexit.

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Self-isolation is feeding my Warhammer addiction

By Tom Chivers

As the academic team behind the British Election Study argue, these big and sudden external shocks “act as catalysts for large-scale vote-switching”, encouraging voters to question their political loyalties and set out on the search for a new political home.

For now, at least, Boris Johnson appears to be on the right side of this crisis — even if the usual suspects on social media are doing all that they can to suggest the opposite. But there is no guarantee how long that will last, whether Johnson will be able to steer the boat in the right direction and what might happen if voters decide that he has failed to do so. What does appear certain is that this crisis will make or break his premiership and reshape British politics along the way, albeit in ways that Johnson was not intending when he won his majority.

Coming after 18 straight double-digit leads for the Conservative Party, the poll by ICM put Labour only seven points behind Boris Johnson’s party, on 34% of the vote. It is the highest share of the vote for Labour that has been recorded by any pollster since early May. That it marks only a two-point increase in Labour’s vote share since ICM’s previous poll, and so is within the margin of error, has largely been ignored. That it suggests that Boris Johnson could fail in his quest to win an overall majority has garnered much more attention.

But why the surprise? The reality is that ever since the campaign began, public support for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has been on the rise.

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How it could all go wrong for Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

In the days before MPs voted for the election to take place, Labour averaged just 23% of the vote. By the time that Parliament had been dissolved and the official campaign had begun this had already jumped to 28%. Today, Labour’s average is about to reach 31%.

Certainly, there are still some in-built disadvantages for Labour. For one thing, if this really is a ‘Brexit election’ then the Remain camp is still strongly divided. Labour is attracting less than half of the Remain vote while in only four months the percentage of Leavers who are backing the Conservatives has rocketed from 39 to 73%.

And then there are the parties’ 2017 electorates. While Corbyn and Labour are today only retaining about seven in ten people who voted for them two years ago, Boris Johnson and his party are today retaining 83% of their 2017 electorate.

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Do manifestos make a difference?

By Tom Chivers

But do not fall into the trap of assuming that this picture will not change because, in my view it probably will.

Aside from the slow but steady increase in Labour’s vote, ICM is not the only pollster to record a bump in Labour’s vote. Panelbase, Savanta and Kantar also have the party up in recent days.

There are other things going on too. While everybody knows that Labour has struggled to win over Remainers, its share of the Remain vote has risen from 32% before the election was called to 46% today. Are Remainers beginning to make some tactical choices? We shall see.

Similarly, look at 2017 Labour voters and that 70% retention today has risen from a level of 50% before the election. One reason why Jeremy Corbyn surprised observers two years ago was because of his ability to not only squeeze the Greens and Liberal Democrats but to win back ‘Labour Leaners’ during the campaign; people who basically agreed with everything that Labour was saying but who remained deeply ambivalent about Corbyn. Is this happening again? The numbers would suggest that things are moving in the right direction for Labour.

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How Jeremy Corbyn could get the top job

By Peter Franklin

Closely linked to this are better figures for Labour among younger voters. Since the start of the campaign, the share of support for Labour among 18-24-year-olds and 25-49-year-olds has increased by five points and 14 points respectively. This is not to say that there is about to be another ‘Youthquake’, (not least because there probably wasn’t one to begin with in 2017). But it is to say that key groups that were central to a stronger Labour vote in the past — in particular the crucial 30-49-year-olds in the ‘Things Can Only Get Better Generation’ — do appear to be falling into line.

Certainly, there are still big problems for Labour. Unlike in 2017, any late rally this time around would be complicated by the stubbornly persistent Liberal Democrats. Jo Swinson and her party continue to average a decent 14% and are holding about one in eight people who voted Labour last time around.

But here there are two things to consider. First, the percentage of Labour voters defecting to the Liberal Democrats has dropped nine points since the start of the campaign. And, second, all of this points to something else: Labour simply has more room than the Conservatives to grow during the final weeks and days of the campaign.

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How the Left lost all purpose

By James Bloodworth

There are still a large number of undecided voters, another group that was key to Labour’s surprisingly strong result in 2017. One reason why we are still likely to see significant change is because of the large number of people who have yet to decide how to vote.

One reason why we are likely to see shifts in the polls: the number of people who are still undecided. As of this weekend 26% (YouGov), 20% (Survation) or 16% (Opinium) of people told pollsters that they have yet to decide who to vote for. These are significant numbers #ge2019

— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) November 25, 2019

As of this week, 26% (YouGov), 20% (Survation) or 16% (Opinium) of people told pollsters that they have yet to decide who to vote for. These are significant.

Meanwhile, between them, the pro-Remain Liberal Democrats and the Greens are still taking 20% of the vote. Is this really going to hold until polling day? Or will both of these progressive parties be squeezed as pro-Remain and liberal voters zoom in on the tactical choices that they need to make? In 2017, between the start and end of the campaign this combined vote crashed from 15% to 9%

And last, but by no means least of all, is the message. There is absolutely no doubt that Jeremy Corbyn remains highly divisive and unpopular. He is the most unpopular opposition party leader since pollsters began to track public opinion. But while the messenger is unpopular we know that this message is not.

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How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

We have been pointing this out for on UnHerd for a while now. And over recent months I have been polling the Labour policy offer in detail, from the majorities who support nationalisation to the majorities who would like to clamp down on financial services and the top 5%.

Many voters do not trust Labour on the economy but many are also instinctively receptive to the claim that the system is rigged. Today, Labour’s even more radical manifesto will strike some observers as fiscally irresponsible but one key lesson in our post-2016 world is that voters do not always approach electoral contests with the same rational choice cost-benefit calculations as think-tankers.

I am not suggesting that Labour is about to win a majority or replace the Conservatives as the largest party in the polls. But what I am suggesting is that with little over two weeks to ago there are good reasons to expect this race to narrow, for Labour to rally and for assumptions about a Conservative majority to be tested. British politics, I suspect, is not quite done delivering one or two shocks.