This is a great point, current Tories have even less excuse for focusing wholly on members
Great piece this. Features a chart that both came as a complete shock but then you’re like “oh, yeah, not a head-scratcher” when you think about it.
Maybe that creates problems for the future and the collapse in Starmer's approval ratings may be a symptom of this. But how to stay in office is a much nicer problem to have than how to win it in the first place.
At some point, the Tories probably need to discuss whether they want to win voters back from the Lib Dems or from Reform. Starmer's Labour made a choice early on about who to prioritise and effectively traded votes in safe seats for votes in marginals.
The interesting thing about the Tory leadership contest is something a Labour person said to me last week "it's all very civil, bit like us in 2010". The implication being that they're on a similar path to Ed Miliband: soak up some discontent votes in mid-term before ultimately losing the election
The most interesting chart is probably this one which genuinely surprised me: Tugendhat and Cleverly are both pretty acceptable to Con19>LD24/LAB24 voters but almost nobody is seen as that acceptable among Con19>Ref24 voters, even Kemi Badenoch is in net negative
James Crouch's take on the leadership candidates as Tory conference kicks off:
James Crouch analyses the party's perceived disunity and how well placed the leadership contenders are to respond to it
...even if it doesn't work at the moment because the Tories have no permanent leader, generally it's good as a cross-check on approval ratings, voting intent, and can be good at highlighting polarised situations like when May and Corbyn were both really low vs. NOTA
So as with lots of these types of Qs, the answer is mostly "that's how we designed it 10 years ago and, for tracking reasons, now we're locked in". I think it was 50/50 whether to have it as a separate opt-out or not (purists among us will note that NOTA and DK mean different things) but...
Probably reasons to doubt the efficacy of the best PM question given that surely some respondents are going "well Sunak lost the election so that wouldn't be appropriate"
