This is the last week before the talking stops and the people get to take centre stage for this general election. The last 4 days will be both frantic and sedate, crucial and pointless, as people solidify their voting intentions if not already. There could be a margin of a few percentage points which won’t change the overall result but might make local results a bit more interesting.
The last days of the campaign will see money spent as much as possible if there is any left. The final push for exposure, for people to start talking about a certain party, is now the last task of the multitude of parties trying to elbow their way to relevance for voters with very little time or desire to spend any more time than is necessary considering the arguments and listening to to the politicians whose job it is to say why they are right and why the others are wrong. There’s not really much to politics but that.
The national polls haven’t really changed with Labour, and the prediction is that their vote share will not dip anywhere below something like 37%, as they have actually dipped in the last week or two, but that won’t really make a difference. As has been noted already on this publication before, the real fun begins with the second-placed parties both in Westminster and in the popular vote. We will do a prediction of the election tomorrow, but for now we are simply predicting that the other major parties in this election will get far, far more local. They will push for the numbers within constituencies where they either have a chance or are within a whiskey of winning, and there are quite a few of these seats.
For the Tories it is and has always been a case of damage limitation. The Tories will be doing everything they can to save seats in the shires, the south of England and in some parts of the East of England. They will be wiped out in the north so won’t bother to campaign there. Their constituency work will be efficient and so they won’t really be worried about a total wipeout, but they will focus so much on local issues and their candidates will remain doing all they can to disassociate themselves with the Tory brand. A ridiculous amount of literature doesn’t feature the Tory logo, let alone the leader, Rishi Sunak. He will probably carry on largely being in hiding, being wheeled out whenever faux outrage or a single and small unifying message needs to be released. The Tories will remain inconspicuous, arguing on local constituency issues and hoping that retains them something over 100 seats.
For Reform, whilst they will really go local too, targeting up to 20 seats to get over the line (around 20 seats where Reform are either leading or on a similar percentage to the current leaders), their national message is the one that is winning in this general election. Their strength is in their national message which is both a success if Nigel Farage continues to assume great popularity in the country. It will also be their weakness as a good national vote share will be hammered in the electoral system. Their next 4 days will be to pivot back to their original messages of immigration-based issues and they will continue to make a spectacle that will find themselves more popular rather than less. Momentum is still with this party and they will really now try to play both the constituency game (of at least 20 seats) AND a national game, where they will get the most attack from, but more on that later. All they will need to do is achieve a high vote share and they will win a big scalp for the time after the election. Come second in the vote share and all bets are off. How they do that in the next 4 days we will see.
For the Liberal Democrats, we really expected them to stop the Sir Ed Davey stunts and weird photo-ops but they just keep doing it. Ed Davey was recently doing open-air aqua-aerobics. We expect the Lib Dems to start taking the election seriously at some point but their leadership basically isn’t. The Lib Dems will work on their local campaign almost exclusively as they have done for the last 5 and a half weeks. We won’t hear much from them. They will continue to give Labour a free pass as they are hoping the last 4 days will see the retention of the Labour-Lib Dem deal that will see them hope for something over 40 seats in the final tally. Their local campaign will be in full swing, but nationally we will hear little.
For the Greens, they’ll do something local but their campaign is incredibly local to the cities and Brighton. They are squeezed out of the leftist pact between Labour and the Lib Dems so they will be hoping to target 1-3 seats to really go hard with. That’s about it.
For the SNP they will really go hard on their last card; Scottish Independence. Scottish Independence is still supported by around 44% of the Scottish public and if they go hard on that they might just stem the tide of woe. Expect them to start thumping the drum of separatism (not independence - you can’t be independent and a member of the EU which they want to join) and they will hope the anti-English sentiment can be found somewhere. But with Labour expected to take Westminster this will be a supremely hard sell; the independence movement relies on the Tories being in power. Without it, expect the USP of the SNP to be shouting SOS.
Lastly, for Labour, they will hope the last 4 days sees them complete their Ming vase tightrope walk. They will do all they can to keep the ‘nothing to see here’ sign as they are set to be appointed by the electoral system as the new government. Expect them to be even more evasive about their desires for Trans ideology, positive discrimination, high tax and the attack on savers, with perhaps a little foray at the very end so they can say after the election ‘we told you so’ as they hammer through policies that will be unpopular. Labour will just want to get one of the least charismatic leaders into government without much of a worry so he can use his lawyer brain to skew the system and to change the constitution in favour of Labour longevity and the erosion of democracy. Labour will look to just sit and wait in their constituencies all over the country and hope that Reform don’t start picking up old Labour votes in the way UKIP did in 2015. They will see Reform polling second behind them in mostly Labour-held seats as is projected and they will hope that in power they can make Reform seem redundant, but with a leader with a +3 personal rating (this is very low for someone about to win a big majority) their aim will be to just sit tight.
The media will carry on their assault on Reform’s popular national message. With an absence of a national message from the Tories and the Lib Dems and the absence of coherence and clarity from the Labour Party, the mainstream media will continue to undermine the only national message receiving traction out in the country whether people on social media like it or not. The media will continue their ‘gotcha’ questions and will look to coax one or two more little scandals out before time is done. But with the drip-drip revelations about the potential set-up of an actor pretending to be racist whilst wearing a Reform UK rosette, the media might rail back on the vitriol that has dominated the last 10 days. They’ll circle the wagons next week and protect their own and after the election try to do a mind-wipe of all the things they have done that are considered questionable in a democratic society. But we feel they’ll try one more time to attack Reform UK whilst doing some ‘balanced journalism’ for the other parties in order to maintain a smokescreen of impartiality. No change here, basically.
Lastly, the polls might change a few percentage points as non-voters return to the fold. These fair weather non-voters tend to vote tactically most of all and we might see the Labour and Tory parties benefit from this. But the polls really struggle to find the truth in a poltiical scene where people throw awful insults at others, causing people to hide their true intentions. The polls will hedge their bets and try to unveil what they believe to be ‘the usual’, meaning a Tory and maybe a Labour surge, but this could be misleading as it was in the Brexit Referendum in the last few weeks, though this is not always the case. In this instance if you want a real prediction look at the betting markets this week. Put a fiver on and see what the odds are. They’ll probably reflect what might happen.
4 days ago and then we get to relax for a bit before the US elections later in November. 4 more days. Almost there.
This article first appeared on the TDL Times. For more information, articles and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.
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