We could be heroes

On persuading voters to defect

The defection of Dan Poulter MP from the Conservatives to Labour proves different things to different people. For the Labour leadership, it proves that the Conservatives can no longer be trusted and that Labour has changed for the better. For left-wing critics of the Labour leadership, it proves that Labour has changed for the worse (they agree on the bit about not being able to trust the Tories). For the Tories Dan Poulter left behind, it proves that he was never a proper Tory in the first place.¹

Two of these reactions are, in their different ways, sour grapes. There’s no getting away from the fact that a former Tory health minister and current NHS doctor leaving the Conservative Party because, he says, it can no longer be trusted with the NHS is good news for Labour. And there’s no getting away from the fact that it is quite difficult to reconcile a “they’re all the same” argument with a “this person chose to leave one for the other” argument: if they’re all the same, why bother moving? You don’t have to like defectors, in any direction for any reason, to concede that defecting is hard and carries significant costs, and that staying put is the easier path.²

Poulter is not a well-known national figure and his defection is, for Labour, a set of useful headlines the weekend before the local elections and a proof-point for a story Labour already wants to tell, rather than a seismic shift. He does not change the narrative; he reinforces it. But finding new ways to dramatise the narrative you are already trying to get across is what campaigning is all about. And Poulter’s defection plays perfectly - so perfectly that I’d be tempted to speculate that it was deliberately timed this way if I didn’t know what I know about herding cats - into one of Labour’s closing arguments in the run-up to polling day.³ Look at the election broadcast Labour put out this week, which is all about people who used to be Conservatives and now are not. Here it is:⁴

This is a “social proof” ad aimed at people who previously voted Conservative: look, people like you, voting Labour. If you’re thinking about doing the same, you’re not alone. It’s OK. It’s normal. It recognises the fact that changing your vote is hard: it can look like you are admitting, even if only to yourself, that you were wrong about something. Nobody likes being wrong. Political parties try to find ways to make this psychological journey as easy as possible. You were right to want the things the Tories promised you! It’s not your fault that they let you down! We don’t hold it against you!⁵

Landing the idea that it’s OK and normal for former Tory voters to be voting Labour now is critical to Labour’s election strategy, because Tory switchers count double. This is a pretty obvious insight if you’re trying to win an election for Labour. You only have to think about it for a moment to work out that someone who used to vote Tory not voting Tory now is one vote off the Tory column, and that someone who used not to vote Labour voting Labour now is one vote on the Labour column, and that some people can be in both categories at once, and that the net impact of just one of these people on the difference between the total Tory vote and the total Labour vote is +2. But it has all sorts of implications for how Labour campaigns.

The current leadership and staff of the Labour Party have devoted an enormous amount of effort to trying to win over people who voted for the Conservatives in 2019. These include what Labour describes, enormously irritatingly, as “hero voters”: variously defined and often overdefined, but basically the kinds of people who probably voted Labour at least sometimes in the past, but backed Brexit in 2016 and Boris Johnson in 2019, were unconvinced - to put it mildly - by Jeremy Corbyn, tend to be older and more socially conservative, tend not to have been to university, and live in Conservative-held seats that Labour needs to win.

Winning these people over means talking about the things that are most likely to appeal to them, and not talking about the things that are most likely to put them off. Hence Keir Starmer’s emphasis on how he has changed the Labour Party (these voters didn’t like the previous leadership); Rachel Reeves’ emphasis on fiscal responsibility (these voters worry that Labour can’t be trusted with the economy); Labour’s unwillingness to say very much at all about Brexit (these voters may well have voted for it); and its willingness to use the union flag in its campaigning materials (these voters are fine with that and with the broader message it conveys, as well as finding the idea that anyone might not be fine with that weird).

You can overstate loads of this: there are plenty of core Labour messages that appeal to “hero voters” and to the rest of Labour’s electoral coalition at the same time: “hero voters” care about the cost of living, but so does everyone else; “hero voters” are appalled by the state of public services, especially the NHS, but so is everyone else; “hero voters” thought Liz Truss was rubbish, but so does everyone else; “hero voters” were offended by Boris Johnson’s behaviour during lockdown, but so was everyone else. Obviously - obviously - Labour is trying to win over other voters too. There are plenty of Labour policies and messages which are aimed elsewhere, without particularly upsetting the “hero voters”. And it’s really important to recognise that there are plenty of Labour voters who don’t come into the “hero voter” category who nevertheless like the fact that Labour has changed since 2019, care about economic credibility, either backed Brexit or have no particular interest in talking about Europe any more, and are perfectly relaxed about the union flag.

But Labour’s calculation is that it can’t win a general election without 2019 Tories. Labour thinks that there are enough of them to make them worth paying attention to, that they are harder to win than some other bits of the electoral coalition that they need to put together - notably, harder to win than most of the people who were already going to vote Labour anyway - and that, crucially, while they are not Conservatives they are not so anti-Conservative that they would never consider voting Conservative or fail to understand why people would, because they did, quite recently. That doesn’t make much difference to most of the policy, but it makes a big difference to the messaging.

“People like you who used to vote Conservative are now voting Labour” doesn’t feel like a punchy attack message. It barely feels like an attack message at all. But it helps to provide permission to people who are thinking about making the same journey. And the responses from both left and right help to reinforce it. The “Labour has changed too much” response validates the change message, and the “good riddance” response validates the idea that they don’t want you anyway. Defecting is hard. Defecting MPs are great. But defecting voters are better.

1. This is the flip-side of the tributes paid to recently-deceased opponents, which I wrote about last year after Alistair Darling died. When your opponents die, you say how much you always admired them. When your allies defect, you say how much you always hated them.

2. The headline on Andrew Fisher’s piece in the i, Keir Starmer has ‘changed’ Labour so much, Tory MPs are flocking to it, inadvertently makes this point. Two Conservative MPs defecting to Labour in over two years is not “flocking”, and the fact that two is being portrayed as a big number is testament to how unusual it is.

3. It would not be strictly accurate to say that this is Labour’s only closing argument in its local election campaign. This is Labour’s other closing argument in its local election campaign:

I am very conscious that I have gone on and on and on and on about this argument, so this post is mostly about something else. Not entirely though: we know nothing about Betty, but she looks a bit like a hero voter to me.

4. There’s a community note on Keir Starmer’s tweet of the broadcast which observes that one of the speakers claims that Boris Johnson was partying the night before the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral, when in fact he was at Chequers at the time - although there was a party at 10 Downing Street that night which some of his staff attended. It’s fair enough to point this out, although I wouldn’t suggest that the Tories go in too hard on “Our disgraced former leader didn’t do this particular bad thing although a bunch of other Tories did, you can’t trust Labour, vote for us”, or on relitigating the lockdown parties more generally.

This is part of a broader problem with unscripted broadcasts like this one: the speaker here wouldn’t have been told to say this; he would have been asked what turned him against the Tories and given this answer. The answer is true so far as his memory is concerned even if it’s not… true. That’s life. It’s fair to say that I’m the kind of person who would, in my old Labour Party job, have tried to stop this bit of the ad being signed off (celebrity supporters, by the way, are worse than real people: absolutely terrible for going off-message when filming election broadcasts, and the source of annoying-at-the-time-but-funny-in-retrospect clashes between the kind of people who make films and the kind of people who get jobs as political party research staff). I hope I would have lost the argument.

By the way, talking of community notes, which I may have mentioned before that I absolutely loathe, look at the absolute state of this one on a tweet from Keir Starmer asking people to vote Labour:

5. Political parties want to make this as easy as possible. Their supporters don’t always feel the same.