Understanding tactical voters, with the help of a new polling technique

Welcome to the 112th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which uses a new polling technique from Focaldata to shed light on tactical voters.

Then it’s a look at the latest voting intention polls followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis. (If you’re a free subscriber, sign up for a free trial here to see what you’re missing.)

First though, this weeks’ stern glare of disapproval is directed towards Conservative minister Maria Caulfield’s preference for a website poll on the Daily Telegraph website over the actual results from real opinion polls.

And this week’s photo from the archives is John Curtice, 1992 vintage.

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Understanding tactical voters better

The kind folk at Focaldata have let me have a play with their new FD_Chat tool, which is a cross between a poll and a focus group.¹ It uses an AI bot to carry out a series of Q+As with different people, providing greater volume than you get from running a focus group but also more detailed insight than you get with a poll - as the bot personalises follow-up questions based on the previous answers. In this case, 51 people considering tactical voting² were asked up to 31 questions.

I was impressed (even a little spooked) but how well the bot choose what to ask at each point. I’m never professionally been a focus group moderator or qualitative interviewer, so it’s possible a pro at those would spot ways to improve the questioning. Even so, as with my first impressions of the tool, it looks to me to have the potential to fill a new niche in the range of market research tools. It’s a bit like a speedier and more flexible version of getting a group of experienced canvassers together to do a really good door knocking session of a particular group of target voters.

So what did it tell me about these possible tactical voters, with a general election looming in which tactical voting could be one of the big factors determining the result?

The first thing that was striking was the motivation: predominantly people say tactical voting is about defeating someone or something they don’t like. There’s some mention of worries over wasted votes but only a little about tactical voting to positively promote a particular outlook. Typical comments were:

Because I know that the only realistic way of voting out the incumbent MP is to avoid splitting the vote so I have to go for the opposite candidate most likely to win.³

and

The country needs change.

That is worthy of note as there are sometimes campaign efforts to mobilise tactical voting to promote a policy, such as getting a tactical voting campaign going to support political reform or the environment. Based on these people at least, that’s not what those willing to think about tactical voting are interested in. Rather, they see it as a tool to defeat someone or something they don’t like.

The second thing that was striking, though perhaps not surprising, was how for nearly all of them it is the Conservatives who are the target of their potential tactical voting ire. Here’s where some caution about the tool should be added, as the evidence from polling is that while anti-Conservative tactical voting is a big part of the picture, there are other forms of tactical voting around which are likely to appear more prominently than came out in this piece of research.

Typical quotes were:

I want to make sure the Conservative Party do not get another chance at winning an election.

and

I think it's important we vote in any way possible to vote the Conservatives out of office.

The reasons for disliking whoever it was they wanted to vote tactically against were, heavily laced concerns over the NHS, and with a few mentions of immigration. But there was also often a strongly held more general hostility to the Conservatives as not being a party that, in their eyes, cared for people like them:

The Covid response was brilliant, and would have been good if they had also listened to their own rules. However they believed they were above the rules, having parties and meetings and making a mockery of the public following rules. There was also the Liz Truss issue.

and

I just don't trust that the Conservatives are going to do the best for the country or for people like me but only for themselves.

If people are going to vote tactically, how will they decide which candidate is the tactical choice? That is an important question because the evidence is that, unbidden, voters are not great at knowing who finished where in the election results in their constituency last time (and, it’s a fair inference, all the more not great at knowing about what changes in circumstances since then may, in some cases, make the last time’s results not such a useful guide).

People generally are a little vague about quite where they will get the information to make up their minds, and even when they offer specific, credible sources of information they are not always sources that actually do provide tactical voting guidance:

I'll be listening to the political scientists.⁴ There's usually local information relative to each constituency.

and

BBC, Twitter, local news.

Electoral data is also relevant:

I will look at the election results for previous general elections or by-elections. I'll also try to see a trend.

and

Looking at the previous results on Wikipedia is the main one. Otherwise I will just see how people I know are going to vote and how social media seems to be indicating how they will vote.

or

When I see projected polls for our constituency.

along with

Polling data I think. Also leaflets that come through the door.

But:

I don't trust the bookmakers' odds when deciding who to vote for. I trust the bookmakers' odds more than I trust paid pollsters.

Tactical voting websites get a look-in too:

I have signed up to a tactical voting website which will tell me who I need to vote for in order to get the Tory MP for our area ousted.

or

I think there are websites specifically set up for tactical voting purposes so I will try to find one of them, and also look at the last election results.

and

I will use the website recommended by Carol Vorderman.

Perhaps what was most surprising was how often social media, even TikTok, was mentioned as a source of tactical voting information.

Overall, I was impressed with how many different sources of information people made reference to planning to look at. If you take the answers at face value (and people may of course wish to give answers that make them look more diligent than reality), then researching the right tactical choice is a task many will take seriously and put some effort into.

The frequency with which the 2019 results are mentioned could be read two ways. One is that with boundary changes since then, it’s going to be harder for people to figure out the ‘correct’ tactical vote and so the impact of tactical voting will be diluted. But the other is that if there’s widespread use of the same source of information - and added to the fact that the 2019 results saw a fair degree of sorting of which party was the main challenger to the Conservatives already - then this may in fact make tactical voting more impactful this time around.

As for the tool, reading through all the verbatim answers for a couple of hours felt like it gave me a very good return on my time compared with canvassing or focus groups. How accurate such online bot responses are compared to those other sources of information is a question that may become of importance. But certainly, this is a tool that looks to have a useful future.

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National voting intention polls

There are now so many pollsters producing polls, I’ve had to upload the table below as two graphics. Aside from that annoying technical glitch, it is great that there is a lot of diversity in how these polls gather their samples and how they then crunch the numbers. And that’s just Survation with polls done in three different ways all out in the last few days and all with similar numbers.

That should give us extra confidence that the picture the polls are painting is correct.

Which is one of the Conservatives being a long way behind, both they and Labour slipping a little in the polls, Reform up but generally clearly behind the Conservatives and the Lib Dems also steadily moving up while the Green vote is flat.

As Dylan Difford points out, “the Labour dip in numbers does primarily seem to be driven by a swing from Lab to LD in the south - presumably tactical voting that makes the Anti-Tory vote more efficient.”

For more details and updates through the week, see my daily updated table here and for all the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.

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Last week’s edition

TV debate polls: not all that they seem.

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Farage’s surprising ratings with 2019 Conservatives, and other polling news

The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are for paying subscribers only, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.