Stephan Shakespeare: Why it's a mistake to target only a small section of voters

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There is a widely-held and wrong assumption that only a small section of the electorate is open to being persuaded from their current political voting intention to a different one. A second, also wrong assumption is that these few voters are located along specific parts of a supposed political spectrum, for example where left and right blur into each other, and that the strategy for winning elections is to understand specific narrow band and target it.

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Stephan Shakespeare: Miliband needs a bigger lead in opinion polls. Cameron's real aim is another Coalition.

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Two or three unspectacular budgets from now the Conservatives could find themselves with five more years of power. It's usually worth betting on mean reversion (I can reach Olympian levels of dullness on this subject, but the fact is hedge funds the world over make plenty of money that way). Over time, things tend to go back to average: they are rarely quite as bad or as good as they seem. Take the recent Lord Ashcroft poll of the marginals.

This invaluable research showed voting intentions in the seats that actually matter at a level implying a 84 seat majority for Labour. But hang on: a very similar poll YouGov conducted for PoliticsHome in 2008 showed a 145 seat Conservative majority if voting had taken place randomly at that moment, and an exact repeat in 2009 showed 70, but by 2010 the reality was... less than zero.

Voters tend (not always, not inevitably, but usually) to be most anti-government a few years before an election, and then swing back at least a little. Miliband needs a notably bigger lead over the next year to feel on course for victory.

The economy, happily, is also subject to mean reversion. Although most forecasts are dire right now, YouGov's monthly in-depth economic confidence index HEAT (household economic activity tracker composed of eight measures) shows the beginning of an upward trend to more normal levels.

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Posted on 20 Mar 2013 07:22:51 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephan Shakespeare: A courageous confrontation with powerful elites may yet save the Conservative Party

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At last weekend's ConservativeHome conference (write-ups here), the stated focus was how to achieve an absolute majority for the Conservatives in 2015. But in truth, no-one believed it; they were really discussing 2020. The fact is that governments only add votes in very rare circumstances, and we are not in those circumstances: Eastleigh confirmed that a) LibDem seats will not easily collapse and b) the strong post-war trend of the two major parties losing vote-share is set to continue; and only Labour could win a majority on less than 40%.

The chart above is the most important of all when considering what happens next. It suggests we face a future of coalitions. The parties have become so similar, and so removed from their traditional base (indeed any base), that it is hard to imagine either of them approaching 50% without taking a radical path. It is more likely they will become practised in the art of the power-sharing deal.

This may after all be no bad thing. The similarities between parties may be the result of a maturing system which produces pragmatic compromises. After all, in spite of so much clamouring for more distinctive manifestos, few propose any strong and credible alternative solutions.

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Posted on 13 Mar 2013 07:35:07 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephan Shakespeare: Modernisation isn't just about gender, sexuality and the environment, it's also about being on the side of the 'little guy'

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The two biggest obstacles to winning elections are intellectual laziness and physical laziness. It's inherently very hard for the Conservatives to win an outright majority given the current state of the economy, the existing constituency boundaries, the poor condition of the campaigning machine, the trickiness of coalition, the absence of any real of pro-Conservative enthusiasm, and the historic trend against the two-party establishment. And yet pundits still try to offer strategic solutions in a few choice words.

Take this statement: "Tories can't outflank UKIP on the nutty right, they must fight for the centre". Nine out of ten wannabe gurus nod happily at that.  But how useful is it really? One classic test is to state the opposite and see if that has any meaning; so: "Tories can outflank UKIP on the nutty right, they must fight for the extremes". If this second statement is obviously daft, then the first statement is obviously pointless. It provides no useful clue on how to win a campaign, it's just about the posturing of the author.

This is where the guru is dangerous to campaigns: truisms are obstacles to genuine analysis and useful action. Right now, the battle of the pundits is focused, absurdly, on defining the exact singular location of the hidden hoard of votes needed for victory: to the left, or to the right? In the centre, or on the flank? Under that bush, or behind that tree? Armchair strategists are having fun.

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Posted on 6 Mar 2013 08:14:12 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephan Shakespeare: Politicians like to have gurus. They need geeks.

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Politics in Britain today is still about gurus and wannabe gurus; it ought to be about geeks. The edge in today's game is to be had in campaigning by numbers - it's data that will let you maximise your vote, it's data incorporated into your mobilisation machine that could take Cameron or Miliband from mere coalition to an overall majority. Anyone who doubts it should read Sasha Issenberg's excellent account of Obama's big win in bad circumstances, 'Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns'. Unfortunately, for a few more years, it's likely to stay a secret - at least for practical purposes - in our old-fashioned, creaky political machines.

Obama's campaign was able to secure victory not by some mysterious quality of inspiration or leadership or great political will, but by geeks who understood how to win extra votes with extra information at the micro level. It's not about big ideas, what matters is tiny real-time experiments which gain a few extra votes in ten thousand nooks. I should declare an interest (and also a proud boast): YouGov/Polimetrix, the US arm of my polling firm, played a key role in creating the data that transformed the Democrats' campaigning organisation from 2006, a process described in the must-read sixth chapter of Issenberg's account, 'Geeks versus the Gurus'. Our huge-scale polling combined with DNC datasets helped to create a likely-to-support predictor and likely-to-vote predictor person-by-person across the country. It replaced the absurdly unusable stereotypes of conventional political strategy (like, in the UK, the Worcester-women and the Ford-Focus-Essex-man) with individual case-level media and message tactics.

Most people in politics prefer gurus, not data. Gurus are people with big ideas about what to do - expressed with lots of confidence and almost no genuine evidence. They rely on the kind of clever talk that can never be proved right or wrong. The good ones throw in a few facts and canny observations, the bad ones talk about hunches and what they feel in their gut, but none of them will help you win. In contrast, the geeks are scientists, and most particularly computer scientists armed with sophisticated statistical analysis programmes and mountains of raw information. Instead of having a few big ideas about swing voters and spreading them pointlessly across the airwaves, they ask - and answer - thousands of tiny specific questions: how will this voter in this house watching this obscure gardening programme on this local cable channel react to this or that particular message? Now let's do it, feed the response back into the database and crunch it again for the next prediction. And again, and again.

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Posted on 20 Feb 2013 08:12:23 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephan Shakespeare: Don't believe the polls that say gay marriage means certain doom for the Conservative Party

Stephan is CEO of YouGov. Follow Stephan on Twitter.

Sometimes polling is misleading rather than illuminative - especially if one is too desperate to find evidence for one’s own point of view. Consider this question, which ComRes ran last week: “Agree or Disagree: I would have considered voting Conservative at the next election but will definitely not if the Coalition Government legalises same-sex marriage”. 14% of those who had identified themselves as likely Conservative voters agreed. Some have concluded from this that legalising same-sex marriage will have a decisive negative effect on the outcome of the next general election.

It’s possible, and I can’t definitely say whether it will truly happen or not. But it seems so unlikely, so very far from any known voting behaviour, that it staggers me it’s taken seriously by anyone. Ask people what are the most important issues for them at the next election – the economy, the NHS, schools, tax, immigration, or same-sex marriage – and we all know which would come last. But put the question the way ComRes put it and you give the respondent a ‘free hit’ to vent some irritation. Especially when the warm-up question is the suggestive “Agree or Disagree: David Cameron's plan to legalise gay marriage is more to do with trying to make the Conservative Party look trendy and modern than because of his convictions.”

This is no disrespect to ComRes. It’s not unreasonable for them to run the question. It’s not an illegitimate question. Such questions can occasionally shed a little light. Maybe this one allows us to measure the extent of anger among some Conservatives. But no sane person would grant this any kind of predictive value. Rather obviously, the next election will not be won or lost on the issue of gay marriage.

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Posted on 5 Feb 2013 06:55:44 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephan Shakespeare: Voters are now slightly more likely to vote for Cameron's re-election but they won't vote to leave the EU

Stephan Shakespeare is Chief Executive of YouGov. Follow Stephan on Twitter.

In a few hours, David Cameron will make a historic announcement that he will offer an in/out EU referendum after a period of negotiations for an improved relationship. It looks like a bold move, but it's also the safest bet: we want to feel in charge of our destiny, but we also want to stick together.

At YouGov we recently went back to our database and re-analysed some polling conducted between autumn 2009 and the 2010 election. It was one of those exciting moments you get from working with longitudinal data, when you can see how things really changed: of those who told us six months before the election that the were "absolutely certain" to vote for the party they then preferred, 20% had changed their voting intention by the start of the campaign. This accords well with the 'choice blindness' study I described last week which demonstrated that even strong opinions could be reversed in five minutes without the opinion-holder actually noticing.

So it should come as no surprise that the majority for an 'out' vote that we've been recording in our in/out EU referendum tracker should have suddenly collapsed (as my colleague Peter Kellner noted here from 51-30 to 34-40. That's a 27% swing in favour of EU membership in just eight weeks (from the end of November to last weekend). What happened?

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Posted on 23 Jan 2013 08:25:32 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephan Shakespeare: People can radically change their minds in an instant, and not even notice

This is the second of a series of five myths and truths of polling from Stephan Shakespeare. Last week he examined the myth of The Big Swing. Follow Stephan on Twitter.

One of the givens of political campaigning is that values are deeper than opinions. This may be true, but unfortunately neither is very deep. Recent research using a ‘magic’ trick demonstrates this very cleverly.

Hall, Johansson and Strandberg (in ‘Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness and Attitude Reversals on a Self-Transforming Survey’, 2012) asked volunteers to fill out a paper-based survey presented on a clipboard. A thin film of paper covered one version of a question with an opposite version (click here for pictures and a fuller description). When the volunteer filled in the survey and turned the page, the answered version of the question became automatically removed and a new, contradictory version was revealed on the page. Magic.

So, the respondent saw the questions like “It is more important for a society to protect the personal integrity of its citizens than to promote their welfare”, and then agreed or disagreed on a ten-point scale. On turning the page, the answered question transformed into its opposite: “It is more important for a society to promote the welfare of its citizens than to protect their personal integrity”. Some volunteers got the question in a more concrete, issue-based version, “Large-scale government surveillance of email and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism’ – with ‘forbidden’ later turning by magic into ‘permitted’.

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Posted on 23 Jan 2013 06:21:11 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stephan Shakespeare: The myth of the campaign swing

In the first of a series of five myths and truths of polling Stephan Shakespeare examines the idea of The Big Swing. Follow Stephan on Twitter.

As we start getting serious about the next general election, we should remind ourselves of some of the basic political realities measured or illustrated by polling. First up, and perhaps the most important for the campaign planner who actually expects to win, is that magical ‘Big Swing’ which at some point lights up even the limpest horse-race, but which is almost always a pure phantom, an in-built illusory effect of our desire for narrative structure.

Remember all that noise about how Romney was closing the gap – nay, winning! Panic in the Obama camp - all hands to the pump! But the race ended exactly as it began, with the President a few points ahead. YouGov’s contention was that Obama was ahead by about the same margin every single day of the election (every one of our many polls had him between 1% and 4% ahead). The only real excitement came from observer over-reaction to error in the polling.

Let’s focus on what was supposed to be the critical moment: the first presidential debate. The polls told us that Romney outperformed Obama. A swing duly followed – Gallup even showed Romney 6% ahead. Republican pundits stoked up the excitement and almost all observers were taking it seriously. But by polling day it was all gone. Two swings? Or none?

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Posted on 9 Jan 2013 07:24:50 | Permalink | Comments (0)