Last year, an embattled prime minister well behind in the polls called a snap election in the wake of a “crippling” rout in Spanish town halls. It worked.
Voters can lean towards a lower limit and favour decriminalisation for the same reason they can favour higher spending and lower taxes. It is the duty of politicians to do better.
If they are to stop Labour sweeping to victory, they not only need to bring back in even more “don’t knows” than models suggest they currently will, but also win back a large number of voters who have abandoned the party.
The public is absolutely exhausted of politicians who are only prepared to offer half measures, and to see our country limp along in a stupor of inaction and failure.
They have grown up in a cultural milieu that denigrates Britain’s culture and history to the point that the idea it is even worthy of respect – never mind dying for – is ridiculous.
According to a YouGov poll conducted only six days after the atrocities, a staggering 49 per cent of 18–24-year-olds in the UK ‘don’t know’ whether Hamas is a terrorist organisation. This is obscene and abhorrent.
Amidst generally woeful scores, the Conservatives still lead on terrorism and defence, and run Labour close on law and order, asylum, and – still – the economy.
Even were this not the case, such ratings only weakly correlate to general election outcomes. There is no getting around the hard work of repairing the Party’s standing with voters.
The Government’s failure to do anything about London’s housing crisis means the capital is now starting to export voters into its wide commuter belt.
YouGov research has revealed an important section of the electorate that Tory strategists would do well to target ahead of 2024.
Together with other recent by-elections, it is broadly in that electoral territory – but it is also consistent with a least one recent survey suggesting a wipeout for the Conservatives.
But if the blue party succumbs to a blue funk, pondering the headline figures only, defeat risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
These results are in effect identical to a YouGov poll published earlier today. If both we and they are right, Sunak needs a massive game-changer to turn this contest round – and he’s running out of time.
In the previous five elections, the size of the shift in the polling gap between election day and six months before has been between six per cent and 12 per cent towards the Conservatives.