A debatable performance
A few quick thoughts on the final leaders' debate before the UK General Election
A funny thing about 2024 is that globally there are a lot of elections happening. There’s a danger of getting mixed up between them all … so for the avoidance of doubt: in this post I’m talking about the UK election debate. Not that other one that happened a day later on the other side of the Atlantic.
It’s a truth occasionally acknowledged that there are two yardsticks by which you can measure whether someone has ‘won’ a debate.
The first is the most obvious: of the people who watched the debate, which participant do the majority say won?
The second is more subtle. Debate audiences are rarely a blank slate, ready to be weigh up carefully crafted arguments in an objective manner before coming to a fair-minded conclusion. It doesn’t work like that! Debate audiences tend to be already interested and engaged in the subject. They come to it with their own ideas. A clever gimmick I’ve seen used at formal debates is to not only count votes at the end, but also at the beginning of the debate. You then report the change in support for the two sides as well as the headline result. What you’re trying to measure is how effectively the participants persuaded people.
Why this preamble? Well—on the obvious measure of success, the final leader’s debate was a dead heat:
But this is quite remarkable! By all accounts we are mere days from an historic Labour victory over the Conservatives, in which only 1 in 5 voters will support the latter—and yet viewers were split evenly? I think we can assume Mr Sunak will be fairly happy with that.
Does it matter?
Short answer: ‘no’. A good debate performance in the final week is not going to shift the polls enough to cast doubt on the final result.
What, not at all?
Here’s the long answer.
It’s useful to think about how the embattled Prime Minister got the upper hand in this final clash. Ironically I think it is because he has given up. That is: he knows there is now no way to win the election. Therefore his objective has changed: the goal now is to preserve a viable1 Conservative party.
In practice, that means they need to eke out a small polling bounce in the final week and thereby save perhaps dozens of vulnerable seats. They must fire up the party’s base. This strategy doesn’t differ so much from what they’ve been doing all along, with one crucial difference: the Conservatives no longer need to appeal to the centre ground. In simple terms: they need to get the ~25% most right-wing2 voters in the country to vote for them, even if the cost is alienating the next-most-right-wing 25%3.
The result: an extreme clarity in the debate over even the most contentious issues. At one point Mr Sunak said something like “Not everyone agrees with me, but at least you know where I stand.” He doesn’t care about irritating moderates anymore with talk of tightening eligibility for benefits, or leaving the European Court of Human Rights, or flying asylum seekers to Rwanda: the moderates aren’t going to vote Conservative anyway. He wants to roll back some of the gains Reform has made and get the core Tory vote to show up for him on Thursday.
So what next?
The fact that erstwhile Conservative voters were convinced by his performance (see the YouGov data above) will buoy the Prime Minister, but let’s be clear: most voters don’t watch the debates. Nevertheless, the debates are important because they set the tone of the next cycle of news coverage.
This will take a few days to bite, but it should become clear early next week whether he has achieved his goal of shifting opinion. In the meantime, we can take a look at what the more right-wing papers are saying:
Remember, the target is the core Tory vote—bad headlines elsewhere matter less.
But are the media that powerful? I’m always a bit sceptical that they can make a big difference to how people vote. Most people will read a certain newspaper or news website because they like its editorial line; most of the time papers are preaching to the converted (and when they switch sides it’s usually because they’re following their readers—protecting their bottom line).
Perhaps this case is different. The Conservative goal is to shift a modest number of votes (in the knowledge that this could make the difference in dozens of seats). And they are doing this by targeting the very people who are most persuadable. If traditional news media has any influence at all, this is surely the easiest of opportunities to demonstrate it. We’ll know soon enough.
By ‘viable’, I mean a parliamentary party large enough to take on the constitutional role of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and to do it properly—one with at least 150 seats, preferably more.
I’m necessarily simplifying here. It’s quite reductionist to speak of ‘right-wingness’—Reform is also a right-wing party, but is not just a clone of the Conservatives and will have some extreme supporters who are now completely inaccessible to the Conservatives. I suppose I really mean ‘people whose politics most predispose them to support Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party, in theory’.
The latter group is already a write-off; if it weren’t, the Conservatives might have been able to win the election.