Part two: Why are Rishi Sunak's personal ratings struggling to revive Tory electoral fortunes? It's all about the Party.

Sunak's ratings are significantly better than either of his predecessors. But unless the party's image also substantially improves, it will continue to languish in the polls.

As we’ve seen in part one (please read this before continuing if you haven’t!), the key bottleneck to improving Tory vote intention seems likely to be the wider Conservative Party brand, rather than Sunak’s personal ratings.

Sunak’s brand may be somewhat inefficient - but that merely reflects the Conservative Party’s poor image - especially among Remain voters, which include the kinds of affluent professionals who had previously been the bedrock of the Conservative voter base. That is to say - the distribution of Sunak’s appeal is only a problem because the Conservative Party has a problem with many of the voters that Sunak naturally appeals to.

But so far, Sunak’s personal brand hasn’t yet been able to change voters’ perceptions of the party. Voters see Sunak and the Conservative Party as quite different entities. This is borne out by recent polls, which seem to suggest some resurgence of Sunak’s ratings, but that this seems to decoupled from voting intentions and the wider Tory brand, where it seems there has been no noticeable impact.

Indeed, the Conservative brand still remains as unpopular now as it was in May/June 2019, in the dying days of May’s administration when the Conservatives polled as low as 17%.

This demonstrates that Sunak’s ratings alone won’t be enough to revive the Conservative Party’s fortunes. Converting his personal appeal into party appeal will be essential to raising the Conservative Party’s ‘vote ceiling’.

Who does Sunak need to target?

To win an election, realistically Sunak needs to improve the Tory brand among both Leavers and Remainers, and frankly demographics of all kinds. To merely turn a landslide loss into a respectable loss, shoring up part of the losses from your Leave base may suffice.

Winning over significant numbers of Remain voters looks challenging. Many of the Remain voters who like Sunak but do not currently support the Conservatives will have voted Labour or Lib Dem in 2019. There are a number of progressive parties that they may like or support. Many such voters, despite liking Sunak, just want the Conservatives out of power. And this will be true even of some Remainers who voted Conservative in 2019, particularly those who did so mainly out of fear of Corbyn becoming PM, and who may be favourable to Starmer. So this group seem like quite high-hanging fruit, and going out of your way to target them may well end up being a losing battle.

In any case, these ‘Remain 2016, like Sunak, dislike Cons’ voters are precisely the type who might implicitly see Sunak as the ‘caretaker PM’ - the interim technocrat who has come to clean up the mess for a year or two before the country votes in a new PM - they don’t necessarily see him as someone who is going to be in serious contestation at the next election. Thus, their approval does not necessarily come with any promise of a vote.

On that basis, despite the presence of what may look like ‘untapped potential’ for Sunak on the Remain side, it feels perfectly rational for the Tories to prioritise appealing to Leavers over Remainers. This seems to be the obvious decision to make. Many of the Leave voters who dislike Sunak are nonetheless not at all fond of the Labour Party / Starmer - so whilst most Leave voters are not happy with the Conservatives at the moment, there’s a much clearer path to winning many of those voters back - they have fewer options to start with (NB: relatedly, I’m quite sceptical that many of the the voters who tell pollsters they intend to vote for Reform UK will ultimately do so - I’ll believe that when I see it. If I’m right, that opens up more Leave voters for the Conservatives to potentially win back. I could be wrong though, of course).

And if this is the strategy, it’s hardly surprising that Sunak is going hard on immigration and asylum, because Leavers strongly support Sunak’s new migration policies. Though note - the Government had better hope their new plan works, as this group is even more likely to think the government is doing badly at managing migration than Remainers, and successive failures have left this group quite cynical about promises to tackle it - so Sunak may end up paying a high price if the Government fails here. It’s about delivery as well as messaging.

However, whilst a relentless focus on winning over Leavers may create a path to recovering enough votes to deny Labour a majority, it’s a lot harder to see how you win an election with this strategy alone. To win an election, Sunak will likely need to unlock many of these Remain voters, too. Uniting such a disparate coalition, certainly given the political context, will be very challenging.

Was Sunak the wrong leader for this voter coalition?

In any case, if the Conservatives were just going to pursue the authoritarian Leave voter types, perhaps Sunak was just not really the ideal candidate for the Tories to make PM in the first place? His natural appeal with these ‘Established Liberal’ type Remain voters could be leveraged to win over voters from this group, but it seems challenging to win over this group while taking stances they strongly oppose.

There is an argument that Sunak’s topline favourability numbers have always been, in practice, somewhat deceptive - if these numbers were inflated by Remainers who were never likely to vote Tory, then this favourability counts for little. Approval / favourability is not created equal. It matters just as much who (which segments of the electorate) likes you; what they think of your party; and what other options they have, and a number of other factors.

As an aside, this is a very similar problem that Kate Forbes would face as leader of the SNP. For an SNP politician, she is popular - relatively - among No voters, and among Scottish Conservative and Lib Dem voters especially. That doesn’t mean she will get them to vote SNP. Forbes’ aggregate personal popularity is - again - arguably deceptive from an electoral point of view. She divides the Yes/SNP base (she is literally net negative among SNP voters, and Yes voters), and is unlikely to win over significant support from ‘across the divide’ because No voters have lots of options, and, bluntly, they oppose independence (Scottish Conservative voters especially), meaning there’s plenty of barriers to getting them to vote SNP. Maybe in the (very) long term, someone like her might be able to shift the demographics of what the ‘Yes’ coalition looks like. But overnight, all her leadership would do is blow the SNP’s coalition apart. It’s incredibly unlikely that she would gain anywhere near enough support from these No voters to compensate for the losses she would likely incur from progressive voters who make up much of the SNP base.

Favourability of politicians among voters is not created equal. It matters just as much who likes you; what they think of your party; and what other options they have.

Back to Sunak - fortunately for him, to the extent that Sunak’s appeal can be seen as misaligned with his party’s 2019 voter base, it isn’t anything like as extreme as Forbes - but it is clearly still a challenge, which will require him and his party to carefully thread the needle.

It’s probably a little unfair on Sunak to suggest he might not have been the right leader for his coalition of voters, because in the circumstances, perhaps there was no realistic alternative regarding who the Tories made PM, and he was the optimal candidate. I certainly figured so at the time, in great part due to voters seeing him as strong on the economy. And it seems plausible that in a scenario where the Tory brand was stronger, and Labour’s rather weaker, his ability to reach out beyond the 2019 Tory coalition could have given him an even higher ‘vote ceiling’ than the party achieved in 2019.

But that is not the current situation. In this context, that high ‘ceiling’ may instead become a low ‘floor’ instead, if Sunak is unable to hold either of the two key cross-pressured ‘swing voter groups’ as I’ve classified them here (i.e. Remainers who like Sunak; and Leavers who do not). The Conservative Party’s inability to win over either of these two groups is what you’re currently seeing reflected in the polling; it’s why the Conservatives remain around 20 points behind. And Sunak’s relative weakness with Leave voters was certainly evident by Spring 2022, well before he became PM. So the current predicament was not wholly unpredictable.

Party favourability, not leader favourability?

More broadly, perhaps the case of Sunak is indicative that party brands that matter more than leadership ratings, and perhaps the puzzlement over the gap between Sunak’s ratings and Tory poll ratings reflects a tendency for horse race commentary to over-index the importance of leadership and underestimate the importance of wider party brands. That is, it seems likely that leadership ratings mainly matter insofar that they influence parties’ brands, rather than being the key variable in their own right. (Of course, the two are not independent variables - Starmer’s and Labour’s brand are currently in lock-step, but in Starmer’s first months as leader his favourability ratings were much above his party’s, before his ratings gradually fell in line with his party).

After all, if voters like you as a leader, yet show no signs of wanting to vote for your party, what good is that? We don’t have a Presidential system. Sunak vs Starmer Presidential election might well be much more interesting and competitive than a Tory vs Labour general election. And if Sunak’s ratings hold up, there is a good argument for Sunak trying to make the next election as much of a ‘Presidential’ election as possible.

But even if his ratings do hold up at this okay-ish level, the challenge for Sunak will be that a ‘Presidential election’ fundamentally not the choice that voters face on election day. If it was, Margaret Thatcher would have never led this country - she trailed Callaghan by almost 20 points on the ‘Best PM’ metric immediately before polling day in 1979, and still won the election, because voters rejected the Labour Government of the day and wanted the Conservatives in power, not because they thought Thatcher would make the better Prime Minister. In any case, overall, Starmer’s lead over Sunak on this metric is currently still nearly as big as it was in Johnson’s final months as PM, so unless that shifts, it still looks much more like a ‘lose respectably’ strategy than a winning one, even if it worked.

It may be that if we had a longer time series on party favourability, we may find that this metric has a stronger correlation with electoral outcomes than leadership favourability. After all, on a conceptual basis, it’s fairly intuitive that your views about a party would be a closer proxy for whether you’d vote for that party than how you feel about its leader. However, the question of which is the superior metric, and over what timescales, may be an unprovable hypothesis because I’m unsure whether long term data for party favourability exists (apart from, obviously, in the form of vote intention) - the frequent use of the ‘party favourability’ type metric seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon in UK polling (though I don’t know for sure - would welcome any insights on historical data for this).

It may also be that party favourability tends to converge with leadership favourability over time, such that:

(i) the current situation where the gap is being sustained is unique, or

(ii) Sunak’s ratings will eventually converge with his party’s over time regardless, as Starmer’s did.

For what it’s worth, the gap has generally been closing over time - i.e. since Sunak became PM, his rating has fallen and the Conservative Party rating has mostly stood still. That is, until the recent mini-resurgence, where Sunak’s ratings have seen a bit of a bump but Tory party ratings remain poor. Perhaps this is just a blip and the gap will continue to close in the longer term.

But in any case, certainly at the moment, voting intention polls are de facto reflecting the differential in Labour vs Conservative party favourability, not Starmer vs Sunak’s relative favourability.

The way forward

The big question is whether Sunak can build on (and improve) his ratings, to make his mark on his party and ensure that the Tory brand improves - ideally, with all types of voters, but especially with Leavers. Through successes such as the Windsor Framework, Sunak is clearly making attempts to leverage and build on his image as a competent statesman who gets things done, and this seems the obvious strategy to take.

However, his party and its allies in the media apparently seem determined to prevent him from improving his party’s position. Whether it’s Hancock’s Whatsapps; Partygate; Raab’s bullying scandal; Boris Johnson nominating his father for a knighthood; Tory MPs pressuring the BBC to suspend Gary Lineker (the list really does go on!); at every turn, Sunak’s successes seem to be overshadowed by chaos in the Conservative Party, or indeed wider negative news stories relating to the economy and public services. And rather ironically, Tory outriders in the press often actually seem to make matters worse - it often seems like the press are killing the Tories with kindness - indeed, including over Lineker.

Given that context, it’s really not that surprising that the Tory brand remains poor. Lately, stories that should help to restore credibility and trust in the Conservative Party ultimately have largely failed to do so. Even where Sunak’s successes as PM do manage to improve Sunak’s own reputation, there’s little evidence yet that this has extended beyond him to benefit his party. This will need to change.

So Sunak may, in the end, be a prisoner of his own fate, good or bad. His agency was always going to be limited by economic headwinds and the wider challenging fundamentals, but he is also at the mercy of his own party.

To have a shot of turning his electoral fortunes around, he will need his party to get its act together, and he’ll need more than a bit of luck.

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