"We are now in the age of ‘cultureonomics’, where the cost of living, hyper-inflation and a lack of wage growth have meant economics has had to make a comeback."
James Kanagasooriam is becoming one of the UK's pre-eminent political data analysts and originated the concept of the 'Red Wall'. He is a frequent contributor to The Times newspaper, the Spectator, BBC radio and Newsnight. He is now the Chief Research Officer at Focaldata, the innovative research organisation helping to bridge the gap between perception and reality. James speaks about political data, how different demographics and generations think, and the changing landscape of political polling.
First things first, the English-speaking world has been through a big reorientation of its politics over the last 30 years. So I always bootstrap my answers from the early 90s through to today.
Why the early 90s? It was the moment of peak class politics in Britain, with the right representing the interests of capital, money and assets and the left representing the opposite.
Since then, we've been through first slow and then increasingly rapid realignment.
University graduates started to shift left, while people who hadn't gone to university; who were disproportionately older and from skilled working class backgrounds would shift right. Brexit then supercharged that shift.
The net effect of this is to reduce cost as a division, meaning the focus of our politics shifted from economics. So for the hardest ‘progressive’ or left edge of voters, it became all about social issues, or global issues like climate change, LGBTQ+ rights or foreign policy. On the other side, people who are less progressive did still care about economics, but it's not what gets them out of bed in terms of politics.
We also see marked differences in terms of generations. Millennials [born between 1981 and 1996] are really distinct here. They are far more progressive than either generation that they're sandwiched between. They are socially liberal, but interestingly, very far to the left on economics, possibly due to when they graduated or their economic circumstance. They’re also very politically charged. The generation below them, Gen Z, are very different. At the last election we saw more Gen Z than Millenials voting for Reform. Interestingly, they have a much sharper-edged economics than the more solidarity-focused millennials.
I would say that we are now in the third stage, the age of ‘cultureonomics’. This is where the cost of living, hyper-inflation and a lack of wage growth have meant economics has had to make a comeback. As much as we want to argue about cultural issues, ultimately you have to be able to pay your bills.
The polls were really far out in the recent election. Most polling firms had Labour at 40 percent and they got 33.7 percent - that's the biggest miss in British polling history. We got lucky in the UK this year because the result was so clear and so vast that it didn't make any difference. But if this had been a closer election, we might have all been expecting the wrong government.
There are a lot of complicated reasons why that might be the case, but in general, it's much harder to assess right wing opinion than left wing opinion. This has been particularly interesting in the US, where there is a low level of social trust in polls, so it is really hard to gauge public opinion. In 2020, Joe Biden was on course for a landslide victory, according to the polls. In the end he got the job by 50,000 votes, which is the equivalent of one person in a group of 2,500 people determining the outcome.
It’s not just the right wing voters who don’t trust polling, we also see a lot of missing minorities and low trust among quite progressive voters (the Bernie Sanders camp, for example).
Every year, the number of people who are open to voting increases and what's called ‘party identification’ decreases.
The reason for this is that parties are no longer mass memberships. After World War Two, the Labour and Conservative parties were massive groupings of millions of people - people went there to meet, to drink, to socialise. Now, they’re social husks; pop-up social organisations instead of actual institutions with millions of members.
That emotional connection [to a party] and also the deep institutional connection - these have all gone. Instead the connection is more contractual.
New, younger voters, particularly Gen Z are ‘a La Carte’ - they will go where they want. That’s where you see a lot of young women are keen for very progressive outcomes, while a lot of young men are more likely to vote Reform.
People are also more open to swapping parties, or to voting tactically. We saw massive tactical voting at the last election.
In terms of independent candidates, this increase in numbers is potentially quite controversial. There are rules against parties based on religious identity and you’re also not allowed to campaign on spiritual matters. However, independent candidates can get around that law.
I think one of the less positive outcomes of the political process is that we’re seeing what we call sectarian voting patterns. I'm not sure it's something that we should potentially celebrate. It’s hard to think of a single moment in history where sectarian voting has ever produced more good than bad.
I think voters now hold their grudges more passionately, but for a shorter time. The Liberal Democrats had suffered a terrible collapse in 2015, but obviously they're back now with more seats.
The theme that's really underpinning your question is one of acceleration: all the political cycles are speeding up. Labour has gone from its worst defeat since 1935 in 2019, to picking up 250 seats - that’s unprecedented.
Now in the latest polls, it's back now below 30 percent - so it's the first government ever to be below 30 percent [in so little time], it took most of the other governments 1000 days. I call it ‘sandcastle politics’: these coalitions might look quite nice, but they can easily wash away.
It’s the same with the Conservatives - they picked up six elections in a row from 2001 to 2019 - the only right-wing party in the world to do that - and then lost it all in one sweep.
Underpinning this are the other, smaller parties - the Green Party; Reform. The big coalitions don't work for a lot of voters necessarily, but with the first past the post system you have to govern… you don't have any choice. So the Labor Party cannot afford to only stand for a narrow brand of socialism, or they wouldn't get elected. It’s the same with the Conservatives.
Ultimately, we have the system that we have and this volatility is not really going to decrease, in my view, until someone kickstarts the growth engine. People don't vote for radical, populist, left or right parties when their lives are getting better, relatively speaking.
Until Britain grows its economy, we're going to carry on with these massive, volatile political cycles.
In the UK General Election, the conservatives lost a lot of the vote and there have been a lot of assertions that they lost a number of different groups of people to different parties.
Interestingly, when I looked into the data, it turns out that the Conservative voters that left are actually all very similar to one another. The people who left for the Liberal Democrats are very similar to the people who voted Reform and those who swung to Labour, which is both interesting and quite counterintuitive.
But this is Conservative growth over the last 15 years. It’s a party that suffers the worst defeats possible and then governs for two thirds of its existence. I have some theories on why that might be the case, because that's a hugely paradoxical position to have.
It all comes off the back of these markers of a person, that all walk in lockstep with each other. If you have these markers, you tend to live in the same area as other people like you - these people are skilled; working class; homeowners. They tend to be over 50 and have almost certainly voted Leave. Most importantly, they tend to be concentrated in rural areas.
You always know when Labour are doing well, because all these big countryside seats are red, whereas they tend not to be for the rest of 100 years of history. Essentially, if you look at those demographics, they explain almost all of the defections away from the party. They lost the trust of these groups of people. The interesting thing is, once the Conservatives win them back, they stack on tens of thousands of votes and then when they get kicked out, they lose all of those votes.
A marginal seat isn't one that's always 50/50. A marginal seat is actually one where all the voters are swing voters, And what that actually means is, if they all change their mind, it doesn't look marginal.
That’s what happened a lot at the last election. Nothing is quite what it seems.
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