Coalition of chaos: Project Fear or Project Flop?

Welcome to this week’s edition which takes a look at the current Conservative hope for avoiding a general election meltdown, talking up fears of a ‘coalition of chaos’ if they are voted out of office. Will an attempt to drum up a new Project Fear succeed, or will it be an insular, process-heavy and implausible message that turns into Project Flop? The polls give us some clues.

In addition, paid-for subscribers will find 10 insights from the last week’s polling at the end, along with all the footnotes.

Before we get to that, as I know many readers are interested in US politics, a little bit of news from America, where The Economist’s G Elliott Morris (author of the other book about political polling that came out last year) is succeeding Nate Silver on the 538 team. Given the critiques exchanged between Morris and Silver in the past about 538’s models, this news would make a fine season finale twist in a TV drama series about 21st century pollsters.¹

As ever, if you have any feedback or questions prompted by what follows, or spotted some other recent polling you’d like to see covered, just hit reply. I personally read every response.

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Coalition of Chaos: the route to Sunak’s salvation?

Very few political tweets have much of a lifespan. Ed Balls and David Cameron both have penned rare exceptions to that. Ed Balls’s famous mistaken tweet has become a long-running annual day of in-joke celebration, even causing The New York Times to ponder, “How Is It Still Funny?”

But more relevantly for this newsletter, in the run-up to the 2015 general election, then Prime Minister David Cameron warned:²

The comment has mutated with age into a prompt for political ridicule, creating a long-running sequence during the succeeding years of political chaos of people asking, ‘Is now the time to retweet this?’

Yet it has also become a widespread political belief that what won it for Cameron in 2015 was those warnings about a coalition of chaos, deployed particular in a series of striking political adverts showing Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond’s pocket.³

Which is why, just as all political parties love recycling the tunes of their former electoral successes, the Conservatives and their friends in the media has been busy trying out coalitions of chaos warnings in a response to the party’s very poor local election results, recycling Boris Johnson’s own attempted resurrection of the theme last summer.

The theory is that warning that a hung Parliament means unstable government is a way to win back support for the Conservatives. Fear the instability of a hung Parliament, put aside your views on the NHS and inflation, and vote Conservative.

Could this message work? Well, let’ see what the polls (and focus groups) say.

First, we’ve got evidence from 2015: did the message work then? Most likely not, and if it did it may even have backfired (by helping increase support for other parties instead) as this analysis of the British Election Study’s data concluded:

We currently find little robust evidence that attitudes towards the SNP and expectations about a hung parliament resulted in gains for the Conservatives from Ukip or in vote losses for Labour from former Lib Dems. We cannot say for sure that this didn’t matter, but our explorations suggest it is a difficult effect to pin down. We find much clearer and more robust evidence that perceptions that there was going to be a hung parliament enhanced votes for ‘challenger parties’ overall: Ukip, Plaid Cymru, the Greens, the Lib Dems and the SNP. This might have cost Labour votes, but not in the ways people may assume.

However, Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh reported in The British General Election of 2015 that,

In late 2014, Conservative focus groups found that the argument that the election could produce ‘competence or chaos’ was a very effective one - and that this message could especially worked with Lib Dem waverers.

But as they go on to caveat it,⁴ pointing out that the focus group work showed the SNP being part of the instability was an important part of that message.⁵ Likewise, Lord Ashcroft’s focus groups, reported in Pay me forty quid and I’ll tell you: The 2015 election through the eyes of the voters (who largely ignored it) emphasised the SNP element:

The party seemed to these English voters to be greedy …, hostile …, and unreasonable.⁶

But even so, for those Labour was able to appeal to this wasn’t the problem:

The prospect of a Miliband-led government dependent on the SMP was not usually enough to deter those leaning towards Labour from voting for the party.⁷

The problem for Labour was that not enough people were leaning towards Labour in the first place, and in as much as some of those were being put off by the coalition of chaos messaging, it was due to the perceived relative strengths of Nicola Sturgeon and Ed Miliband, rather than the concept of a hung Parliament itself. And even then - as per that BES data - quite possibly not very many people were put off by that.

There is also a question of timing: the Conservatives deployed the 2015 version of Project Fear relatively late in the Parliament. But the evidence - both in general from other Parliaments too and specifically in the leadership and party brand reputation polling throughout the Parliament - is that Labour’s defeat in the 2015 election was the result of long-running flaws rather than due to any late Parliament magic new message deployed by the Conservatives.

So if the evidence for the message’s impact in 2015 is limited, what about a 2024 revamp of it? The most obvious starting point to make is that Humza Yousaf is, in polling terms, no Nicola Sturgeon or Alex Salmond. Keir Starmer too, though to a lesser degree, is no Ed Miliband.⁸ If the message’s impact depends on the fear of a strong leader of a small party domineering over the weak leader of a larger party, it’s a much harder case to make this time around.

Moreover, all those later jokes about David Cameron’s quote come with a point. It’s not exactly been stability since 2015, has it? Whatever one many think of the 2010-15 government, unstable it was not. Cameron could raise fears that dispensing with him as Prime Minister would also dispense with stability in a way that Rishi Sunak, the third Prime Minister of 2022, can’t really.

That’s not just a judgement by me, it’s also what comes through in the new polling in the last few days from both Opinium and YouGov.

Opinium’s data shows that only 35% think a Conservative majority government after the next election would be mostly stable (with 46% picking mostly unstable). A potential Labour government is more widely seen as likely to be mostly stable (45%-36%). A Labour/Lib Dem arrangement comes in only fractionally less stable than a Conservative majority government (32%-44%) and a Conservative/DUP arrangement has only 17% picking mostly stable (57% mostly unstable).

This graphic from Opinium contains a small error: the Lib-Lab and Conservative majority pies have been swapped around. Reverse the labels for the right figures for each.

That doesn’t look like a backdrop against which ‘vote Conservative or you'll get instability’ will have much traction.

As Opinium’s Adam Drummond wrote of their data:

For Conservatives, a lack of faith can also be found in worrying places. A quarter (24%) of 2019 Conservative voters think a Conservative majority would be unstable, while 38% of Leave voters think the same thing. Overall, if the Conservatives are launching a stability-based attack, their defences are looking frail.

Similarly, even a fifth (19%) of those currently intending on voting Conservative say that a Labour majority would make for a stable government. It is possible therefore that prioritising the majority vs. hung parliament angle may push wavering Lab/Con switchers towards Keir Starmer as the more stable option. This highlights once again the central problem Rishi Sunak has which is that while his own ratings are competitive with Keir Starmer (albeit generally a few points behind), the party he leads is deeply unpopular and distrusted.

The picture is a little more promising for Sunak with YouGov, but again it’s not one that suggests ‘coalition of chaos’ will be powerful enough to pull his party out of its slump in support.

Their data tells us that when asked, “Thinking ahead to the next general election, which of the following outcomes, if any, appeal most to you?”, (only) 48% picked one of the majority government options on offer in the answers (e.g. a Labour majority). 18% picked a coalition of some sort, 16% wanted a different option completely and 17% didn’t know. That 48% total isn’t strong evidence of a big fear of hung Parliaments - and so also implies that voters are much more likely to look to other issues to determine their vote.

Likewise, asked whether, if the next election produces a hung parliament, this will be a good or bad thing, 46% pick a bad thing, ahead of 27% picking a good thing. But thanks to the 26% picking don’t know too, that’s (only) 46% picking a hung Parliament as a bad thing. Again, therefore, it’s not strong evidence of a big fear, especially as asked what should happen if there is a hung Parliament, the public said by 42%-31% it would rather there was a coalition or other agreement than another general election. You wouldn’t prefer a hung Parliament continuing if you really think it’s something to avoid.

Given the current state of the Conservatives - polling only slightly better than Michael Foot’s 1983 Labour Party and facing almost certainly much more widespread tactical anti-Conservative voting - none of this looks like re-running the 2015 tunes will achieve anything close to the scale of what’s needed to rescue the government.

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National voting intention polls

Here’s the latest from each currently active pollster:

For more details and updates through the week, see my daily updated table here and for all the historic figures, see PollBase.

Last week’s edition

What's happening in the voting intention polls?

Know other people interested in political polling?

A surprising (and, for Conservatives, worrying) poll finding, and other insights from this week’s polling…