Who and where are the voters who will decide the outcome of the general election?
HE OR she must be out there somewhere. That is, according to some marketing men and pollsters. Every election throws up an identikit swing voter—“Mondeo man” and “Worcester woman” in campaigns of yore—whose demographic group is said to hold the key to the outcome. The latest alliterative super-voters include the “Swindon swinger” and “Motorway man”; the latter connotes a rootless, consumerist 20-something who lives on a new housing estate and near a motorway junction. This week Bagehot headed north to try to find these mythical voters, and to discover whether they really hold such sway.
He began in Bury North, in Lancashire. The textile mills that once sustained Bury are derelict; the steam railway that runs through it now carries tourists rather than cloth. But proximity to Manchester has helped it to weather the collapse of the old industries. The constituency also includes moorland and some prosperous villages. It is a classic marginal, falling to Margaret Thatcher in 1983 and to Labour in the 1997 landslide. To win in 2010, David Cameron’s Tories need to reclaim it.
On the fringes of Bury, the Victorian terraces give way to the sort of new estate in which, Bagehot speculated, “Motorway man” might lurk. But things are evidently more complicated than such categories imply. David Nuttall, the congenial Tory candidate, points to several key sets of voters: couples with young families; first-time voters; and, in a seat where the state is the largest employer (the biggest private one is a call centre), disgruntled public-sector workers: the sort of people to whom the recent Tory talk of mutualism in the public services was pitched. The planned closure of a local maternity ward is a hot topic.
The biggest struggle, however, may be to overcome the resentment caused by the parliamentary-expenses scandal. It has touched Bury North particularly because its Labour MP, David Chaytor, is among the handful now facing criminal charges. But Labour may not be the only party to suffer: it has a new candidate, and the backlash seems to be indiscriminate. At a pensioners’ lunch at a Bury pub (which advertises “recession specials”) the anger is general: “they’re all as bad as each other”; “they all promise the moon”. Here the most important type of elector may not be swing voters but those too furious to vote at all.
That may also be true in North West Leicestershire. Even the Liberal Democrat candidate—not fancied to triumph—reports vitriolic abuse on some doorsteps. On the high street in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, a tidy market town, Bagehot momentarily thought he had found the archetypal swing voter: a youngish mother who lives on the edge of town and whose husband works for Rolls-Royce—just the sort of characteristics that political strategists get excited about. But she turned out to be a vitriolic Tory-hater (“I remember what the Tories did in the ’80s…”). There seems still to be a surprising amount of that sentiment around.
Like Bury North, North West Leicestershire lies in what some senior Tories describe as the “triangle of hope”: the swathe of seats from the Midlands to the north-west that their party must conquer to secure a parliamentary majority. Politically as well as geographically, the constituency is in the middle of England. Like Bury North it was taken by Labour in 1997, and combines comfortable bits with grittier areas such as the town of Coalville. (There are a monument and a museum to Coalville’s mines, but the things themselves are closed.)
Labour has a new candidate here as well, but for different reasons: David Taylor, the popular incumbent, died in December. Party workers refer to the wavering voters whom he managed to retain as “Taylor Tories”. They are a potentially vital group. But another are those former Labour voters, mostly in Coalville, who in council elections have switched to the British National Party: immigration is a big concern here, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that there isn’t much of it. Another prime target for the candidates are the activist professionals in Castle Donington and other twee villages outside Ashby. They have organised protests against assorted unwanted developments and the closure of local facilities; all the parties court their favour assiduously. “Motorway man” and his ilk seem a relatively low priority.
Thatcher’s children
“Worcester woman”, “Mondeo man” and the rest are mostly variations on the same general theme: they describe the lower middle classes and skilled manual workers—C1s and C2s in marketing speak—who are thought to be more politically volatile than other voters, and thus to decide the fate of marginal seats and so elections overall. In truth, politics has always been more complicated than that; among other things, as an old political adage and Bagehot’s travels suggest, voting has always been influenced by local characters and concerns. And in 2010 the business of winning elections has become more complex than ever.
Some Labour and Tory figures talk optimistically of reviving the coalitions of voters that Tony Blair assembled in 1997 or that Mrs Thatcher corralled to her side in the 1980s. But in the past 13 years, to say nothing of the past 30, the structure of the economy and the shape of the electorate have changed dramatically. Even before the expenses palaver, fewer people were voting, and more of those who did were voting for smaller parties. Class allegiances have become less predictive of voting patterns; the main parties’ bases have fragmented. There are more opportunities for politicians to grab votes from their opponents, but a greater risk of losing some they once relied on. They need more sophisticated campaigning and more local nous than ever to succeed.
Bagehot didn’t find the legendary super-voter on his little tour. That may be because he didn’t look in the right places. But it may be because the super-voter isn’t out there after all.
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