YouGov’s Stephan Shakespeare on how the public would view the four candidates — if they were all better known
Up to now, polls on the Conservative leadership have been flawed in a fundamental way: they have tried to gauge public reaction to a group of candidates, when one of them is much better known than the rest. But this contest is about the future — about how they might be regarded after they become leader, when the public gets to know them better. And so YouGov and The Spectator designed a poll to get some vital added insight.
First, we asked 4,000 people representative of the UK electorate how likely they were to vote for each of the main parties, on a scale from 0 to 10. Labour’s average rating was 4.0, the Conservatives’ 3.3, and the Liberal Democrats’ 3.2. We then randomly split them into four groups, with each group finding out more about just one of the main candidates.
They were shown a picture of either Ken Clarke, David Davis, Liam Fox or David Cameron, and given five statements about him. The purpose was not just to discover each candidate’s strongest points, but more importantly to engage the respondent in what, for most of them, would be new information. Finally we asked them to imagine that the candidate they had just assessed had become the leader, and to say again how likely they would then be to vote Conservative.
Comparing the opening score and the end score tells us something about the effect of each candidate. This is a truly scientific test, as each group has been given the same opening and closing questions, but with a different stimulus in between. Assuming the five statements are a fair reflection of the candidacy, this gives us better data than any previous poll.
The most striking thing about the results is that when the public learn about the candidates on their own terms they warm to them all to a greater or lesser degree — any one of the four candidates could make people more likely to vote Conservative.
Without the immediate advantage of recognition, Ken Clarke was no longer the front-runner. Once the public were given pictures and information about candidates they may not previously have been familiar with, David Cameron and David Davis became the candidates who most increased people’s likelihood to vote Conservative — up from 3.3 to 4.2.
Cameron’s main weakness was his Eton education, which had a net rating of -23, although over half the sample said that it was neither a positive nor a negative factor. David Davis’s own upbringing and his business background were seen as strong positives (+50). David Davis’s leadership particularly appealed to female voters, whose likelihood of voting Conservative went up to 4.3 with Davis as leader (among men it was only 4.0).
Cameron’s and Davis’s advantage over the other candidates was relatively small. Ken Clarke and Liam Fox would increase people’s likelihood to vote Conservative to 4.0 and 3.6 respectively. While Clarke’s opposition to the war in Iraq was seen as a plus (a net rating of +41), his association with British American Tobacco was seen as a huge negative (-50). Fox’s emphasis on the family (+55) was seen as a positive, but his Atlanticism was seen as a negative (-20).
What our poll shows, though, is that once the public learn something about the candidates, the differences between them are relatively small, and any of the four could be a real asset to the Conservative party. The party should feel able to ignore the traditional polls telling them that only one candidate can possibly win an election, and make a real choice, free from the claims of the pollsters and pundits.