Polls mask many ‘undecideds’ and fuel Labour worry about mobilising voters | General election 2024

In three weeks’ time, Ed Davey could be standing in front of the despatch box as Leader of the Opposition, Rishi Sunak could be on a plane to California after losing his seat and three-quarters of the cabinet to job hunting as more than 500 Labor MPs take their seats. No leadership chances for James Cleverley, Penny Mordaunt or Priti Patel out of place.

Are these predictions realistic, or as strange as they sound? Not all surveys are so apocalyptic about Conservatives as the scenario above describes, but if Keir Starmer enters parliament with a majority of 150, it will now feel almost disappointing.

Inside Labor Headquarters, has a policy of not discussing the surveys at all and making decisions based solely on the party’s own data and a precisely targeted strategy.

But for Labor trying to mobilize voters, polls become positively useless. It is the Tories who stand to gain the most from the argument that it is important to have a bastion of Tory MPs as a counterweight to an unprecedented Labor majority to motivate their disillusioned base and activists.

It is also a key argument for Starmer’s critics on the left. Labour’s landslide is nailed down, they say, so vote your conscience for the Greens or independents if you want to put pressure on the party over the climate crisis or the war in Gaza.

And it’s easy to see why there’s some merit to that argument – polls suggest Starmer would be the most powerful prime minister in modern times with a majority double that of Tony Blair in 1997. But look deeper. take a closer look at the data and hear the on-the-ground reports from Labor MPs and campaigners and the picture is not quite the same. A dozen Labor candidates the Guardian spoke to this week said that while Tory voters in their caucuses and elsewhere were deeply disillusioned and divided, they faced large numbers of undecided voters.

Even if Labor HQ believes the polls, the party does not have the capacity to work with all potential targets. “The Tory vote is collapsing towards reform in long-term seats,” said one MP. “But a lot of them I don’t think are realistic. We are not diverting resources.”

“We feel more volatile than ever with much unresolved and uncertain,” another MP said.

“It’s positively useless,” said another, drawing a comparison to the 2017 election when people voted Labor thinking then leader Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t win. “So many ‘undecided’ voters can lead to the Tories because they think it won’t matter … I’ve been in a place where the Tories are hiding in undecided answers too – so I expect things to narrow a lot.”

Some Labor candidates are so concerned about their own, safe seats that they are annoyed at being pushed by Labor HQ to campaign elsewhere – and some of the Labor WhatsApp groups are almost rioting about the degree of control on their movements. Ellie Reeves, the party’s deputy campaign co-ordinator, recently told them not to make more than 500 contacts in their own seats and that those with larger majorities should spend at least five days a week in battlegrounds.

Latest MRP Surveys – for Savanta and Ipsos – set between 100 and 150 places per knife. The polls use a method that takes about 10 times the usual number of respondents and extrapolates that data to constituencies.

But many different methods are being used by all the different pollsters who are now using this new PMP polling method to penetrate the various constituencies. In the past, these polls have been very accurate – the YouGov MRP poll in 2017 was the only one to find that the Tories would lose their majority.

But the number of voters actually polled in each constituency is small, and the methods used to determine how this will affect the national picture vary from pollster to pollster. All predictions are for Labor to win – but between all pollsters the results varied by 134 places.

Sometimes polls show strange results in certain places where the local picture is complex. Just last week polls predicted Nigel Farage failing to take Clacton – and also predicted he would win by the biggest margin in history.

The bottom line for the Conservatives is that – for all the vacillating around undecided voters – no one sees a return to Sunak. Campaigners say they hardly ever meet anyone who says they vote Conservative. Nothing Sunak said during the election campaign – whether it was politics, attacks on Starmer or his presentation in the debates – has moved the dial from negative.