Will voters back President Sunak against a coalition of chaos?

  • Insight
  • 26 May 2023

by Luke Tryl

The Conservatives are hoping that the threat of a coalition of chaos and the public's ambivalence about Kier Starmer will drive success at the next election. Our latest polling suggests otherwise.

There might not have been much in the way of clear-eyed thinking emerging from last week’s National Conservatism Conference, but on one point Lee Anderson was spot on. Ask Tory voters why they backed the Party in 2019 and they’ll give you three main reasons - Getting Brexit Done, Corbyn and Boris. None of these, of course, pertain today.

That lack of powerful motivators to vote Conservative - together with the fall out from party-gate, the cost of living crisis and the mini budget - explains why Tory strategists are scrambling to identify a new winning formula for 2024. So far they have identified two potential possible liferafts. The first is that, although the Conservative brand is in the gutter, Rishi Sunak is more popular with voters. The thinking in Tory circles is that if they can make the next election a presidential contest then the Prime Minister's personal appeal, in contrast to ambivalent views on Starmer, will propel the Tories to victory. In the wake of this month’s local elections, which saw significant Tory losses but didn’t guarantee a Labour majority, the second strategy is to return to the 2015 playbook. The hope here is that the spectre of a left-winning coalition of chaos will be enough to force wavering 2019  Tories to give the Conservatives another chance.

The problem for the Tories is that our new polling suggests that neither is quite as buoyant as the Conservatives might have imagined. 

Starting with the prospect of a Coalition, we asked the public to rate how good or bad different possible formations of Government might be. The clear preference was for a Labour majority - something echoed in our focus groups - with worries that a coalition will lead to watered-down policies which won’t solve the problems the country faces. But even with that concern, the public still rated a Lib-Lab Coalition as better for the country than a Tory majority would be. With the ongoing imploding of the SNP in Scotland, the public are just not that worried about Starmer teaming up with Ed Davey’s party.  

In fact, not only were those currently intending to vote Labour overwhelmingly likely to say that Labour making a deal with the Liberal Democrats would either make no difference or make them more likely to vote Labour, when we asked what they thought of the Liberal Democrats the words they used most were ‘sensible’ and ‘centrist’. The worst thing Labour voters had to say about them was to call them ‘boring’ and ‘irrelevant’, hardly the hallmarks of a bogeyman.

In contrast, the least popular outcome from our latest polling was a Tory minority government supported by a party like the DUP - something which currently appears to be the only outcome the Conservatives could feasibly hope for. Perversely then, it could even be that this time around, it is the Tories who are hurt most by the prospect of a ‘coalition of chaos’.

What about Sunak’s personal appeal? To get around the fact that Party Leaders’ approval ratings are often tied to what people think about the party they lead, we asked instead if Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were ‘assets’ to their parties. If Sunak’s personal brand is the silver bullet it is supposed to be, we would have many more voters to say Sunak was an asset than Starmer. But we found almost no difference between the two - with voters in fact marginally more likely to say both were an asset to the party.  More worrying for the Conservatives,  was that while the crucial group of swing voters who backed the Conservatives in 2019 to deliver Tory victory in the Red Wall did, narrowly, agree Starmer was an asset they actually said the opposite of Sunak. Though there was some good news for the Conservatives with the more liberal ‘Cameroon’  group of Conservatives believing Sunak was an asset in greater numbers than said the same of Starmer.  It is, however, hard to avoid the overall conclusion that while Tory strategists might think that the President Sunak strategy will save the day, voters don’t necessarily agree.

The truth is that the next election is not going to be determined by a clever ad campaign about coalitions. The public instead is going to decide how to vote on the basis of who they most think will help them through the cost of living crisis, who will fix the NHS and, for a smaller but still significant group, who will stop channel crossings. If you want further proof of that, those are exactly the things Sunak’s five pledges seek to address.  The problem is that with fewer than a quarter of the public believing that the cost of living crisis will end this year or next, the window to turn things around is closing fast. Never say never in politics, but the fundamentals matter, and this time they are not on the Conservatives' side.