When you get the chance to speak to the CEO of YouGov on the day Ed Miliband announced his promise to abolish non-dom tax status four weeks before a General Election, you just have to ask the question.
Could this be a turning point for Labour?
The answer is no, not really. And Stephan’s been following election campaigns since before I was born, so I’ll side with him on this one. However, Miliband’s non-dom prom is “the biggest hit of the campaign so far,” he says. The policy is:
“…symbolic of messages that are out there already. Labour’s strongest card is ‘We care about people like you, the other guys care about the rich.’
“And that has a sort of factual basis – I don’t mean in terms of actual caring, I’ve got no idea if Labour cares or if the Conservatives care about this or that. But what I mean is that it is the Conservative belief that you have to make the economy work and you have to make capitalism work in order to do that.
“And therefore they [the Conservatives] are always going to support policies that do not hurt what they would regard as the wealth-makers. To those who don’t buy that analysis of the economy, and of society, they will look as if they care about the rich.”
I like YouGov. I read Stephan’s column in the Times Red Box bulletin, about the findings of exclusive polling. But I was interested in what YouGov’s unique selling point is.
YouGov conducts polls with greater reliability
The pollsters have been collecting data from their panelists since its launch in 2000. And what this throws up is a valuable backlog of information so we can analyse trends in people’s opinions.
“The huge value of our methodology is that nearly every other pollster only gets the information that they’ve asked for in that poll, whereas we have this huge background of information, including for lots of them, what they voted at the last election. So we can get very exact in what is real change.”
With the rise of the stand-alone data-driven election website (Red Box and May2015 are a couple of examples), it feels like we’re witnessing Britain’s first truly data-driven election. Now that could be made into a nice headline but when compared with our cousins across the Atlantic, we’re not quite there yet. And here’s why:
Money. The biggest reason we haven’t seen a data-driven election in the UK is because there’s much more spending in the US.
When you’re spending a lot of money on political advertising, it’s hardly surprising you’d want to know how best to spend it. That’s what’s really behind a data-driven election, says Stephan.
With the Obama campaigns, we saw “really high quality predictions of what to expect from each household, what are the likely issues that matter to them, which are the ones worth knocking on, which are the ones worth ignoring, which are the ones that might give you money, and therefore be approached by mail or whatever, who are the ones that you can get to vote on the day — that’s a data-driven election.
“You’re using whatever data you have available, which in the early days is quite generalised, but as time goes on becomes more and more granular, to allow you to treat each individual voter with some foreknowledge.
“You’ll never know exactly what they’re thinking but you’ll have some foreknowledge which will therefore help you – and this is the critical point – to use your resources in a smart way. That’s a data-driven election and that’s not happened yet.”
As campaigning becomes more atomised in its approach, spin-doctors will be losing a lot of sleep over how representative the polls really are, and whether their outcomes will hold true come election day.
Do we place too much trust in polls as predictors?
“You’ve always got to fight to win, right? So you should never give up if the polls tell you that it’s hopeless – or that it’s already in the bag. But you should always use the best evidence you’ve got and take that as your starting point.”
Winning ≠forming a government
Winning and forming a government no longer go hand in hand. People are going to have to vote tactically by considering which collective of parties are most likely to be able to form a government post-election.
The chief driving factor in this election for Stephan is whether people will work out what they need to do in order to get what they want, in time for the election.
“Most Ukippers prefer a Conservative government to a Labour government. If they work out in the next four weeks that they are harming the chances of a Convervative-led government and helping the chances of a Labour-SNP government then they may change their minds and vote to get their realistic aim.”
Is immigration the driving force behind everyone’s vote?
No. Even among Ukip, says Stephan, immigration isn’t the most important issue. YouGov asks the question in two forms:
What do you think are the most important issues facing the country?
And:
What are the issues that matter to you personally?
For the first question, immigration comes very high on people’s agenda, as well as public services and the economy. But for the second question, immigration drops way back and it’s the economy or public services that people care most about.
“My explanation for that is that immigration is a real annoyance to people who are unhappy about their economic situation or whatever it is, their lives, where they live, and they put it in those terms.
“But the real thing they care about is the actual nature and quality of their lives, which are being driven by these other factors much more. And they end up feeling very anti-establishment, and immigration is one of those issues the establishment, in their eyes, can’t fix.”
Featured image credit: Policy Exchange/Flickr
Emoji provided by emoji.ink
Register to vote. The deadline is soon
The deadline to register to vote is 20 April. It’s really quick and easy. So, what are you waiting for?
Ben is a digital journalist, chief sub-editor and former tabloid hot shot. He likes to tell stories in compelling ways and he is a master of the art of live tweeting.