Why are Rishi Sunak's personal ratings struggling to revive Tory electoral fortunes? (Part one)

Sunak's ratings are significantly better than either of his predecessors. But the party continues to languish in the polls. Digging deeper into the polling reveals some possible reasons why.

Rishi Sunak has recently seen a boost to his approval and favourability ratings. However, despite a wide range of results in recent weeks, the vote intention polling average has barely moved - the Conservative Party remains 20 points behind Labour.

The apparent inability for Sunak to convert his okay-ish ratings into okay-ish vote intention for the Conservatives is a topic which deserves attention, given historical correlations between party leader ratings and electoral outcomes. Indeed, leadership ratings have sometimes accurately predicted election outcomes where voting intention itself has got it wrong.

Potential explanations for poor Tory vote intention

Leadership ratings are not the only important factor in deciding how people vote, of course. There are any number of potential (if obvious) contributing factors that could explain this discrepancy between leadership ratings and Tory polling numbers, including (but not limited to):

• Government approval remains in the toilet, despite some minor recovery compared to the Truss era. You might think Sunak is doing a good job himself, but that the government he leads is not, thus you don’t vote for his party. The polling implies quite a lot of people are in this box.

• Trust in the Conservatives to run the economy continues to trail behind Labour, and there’s that little thing called the cost of living crisis, which the public continues to be unimpressed with the Government’s handling of.

• Public services remain a mess - healthcare is the second most important issue to the public, and at the time of writing, only about 12% of the public think the Government is handling it well.

All of the points above are important, and many have been discussed at length, so I won’t dwell on this too much here.

More broadly, perhaps the country is undergoing a sea-change in public opinion - like it did in 1979 - and simply thinks it’s time for a change. And therefore, many voters may view Sunak as a steady caretaker PM to bridge us to a Labour Government next year. For such a voter, what they think of Sunak himself may matter less in terms of who they vote for, because they’ve already written off the Government - as seemed to be the case for the relatively popular Jim Callaghan back in 1979.

Key takeaways

In these two posts, I mainly want to land three key points which have been under-explored in discourse, but which may explain much about the apparent discrepancy between Sunak’s ratings the Conservative vote intention:

1. Unlike for Starmer, Sunak’s appeal may be inefficiently distributed across the key voter groups - meaning his ratings don’t convert efficiently into votes.

2. The weakness of the Tory brand looks like it could be the key constraint to improving Tory vote intention at the moment (rather than Sunak’s personal ratings), and to date Sunak has been largely unable to improve this.

3. Whilst Sunak is doing many of the right things to tackle this, his successes are being drowned out by negative news stories. Unless his party also gets its act together, it will be challenging for Sunak to reverse his party’s fortunes. And to be competitive at the next election, Sunak will likely also need the fundamentals to shift in his favour, too.

In this post, I’ll take a data-driven approach to addressing points 1 and point 2, and in the second post I’ll delve into wider discussion of points 1 and 2 and also cover off point 3.

1. What does Sunak’s personal support look like?

In short, a big reason why Sunak’s okay-ish approval ratings are ‘okay-ish’ rather than ‘very poor’ is because he picks up a substantial proportion of his approval from people who voted Remain in 2016. Sunak’s issue is that a large proportion of these voters (currently) show no signs that they are willing to consider voting Tory, despite their approval of him (more on this later).

Meanwhile, concealed by the overall figures is that Sunak’s ratings among Leavers are actually quite poor - certainly for a Conservative leader. His YouGov ‘net favourability’ rating among Leavers was -10 last week, in fieldwork carried out a week after the Windsor Framework was announced. If you want some context as to how unimpressive this is, Johnson only reached this level with Leave voters after Partygate destroyed his reputation (-9 in January 2022), and in the week he resigned as PM (-14 in July 2022).

Rishi Sunak is nearly as unpopular among Leave voters now as Johnson was during Partygate.

Sounds shocking, right? Almost hard to believe, even. But this is not a unique or outlier finding. While YouGov favourability scores tend to skew quite negative, the general trend is similar among other pollsters - e.g. Ipsos’s latest favourability data had Sunak at 34% favourable (net -5) among Leavers, similar to what they had for Johnson (34%, net -10) among Leavers at the beginning of February 2022.

Of course, I’d certainly caveat this in that the intensity of views aren’t as strong towards Sunak (in both directions) - he’s just not a polarising figure like Johnson was. And favourability ratings, strictly speaking, aren’t the same as approval ratings - Sunak does perform better in some approval rating polling elsewhere (although his relatively uninspiring numbers among Leavers is a fairly universal finding)

But the point is this - if this is Sunak’s position today among Leavers after a polling boost (he was -22 among Leavers a month ago), this certainly starts to give you a feel for why the Tories remain 20 points behind. And, perhaps, goes some way to explaining why some Tory MPs believe Johnson is still an election winner and thus desperately want Johnson back as PM (not that this would help at all, given how unpopular Johnson remains).

The distribution of Sunak’s appeal: far from optimal?

To state the obvious, this is all quite a problem for Sunak because - at the moment (and probably for some years to come) - the ‘Leave’ column is where most of the potential votes for the Conservatives are to be found. So if you’re a Conservative leader, you’d much rather your favourability was concentrated in the Leave column than spread more equally, as Sunak’s is.

Essentially, Sunak is currently stuck between two potential coalitions. His natural appeal is higher among Remain-leaning ‘Established Liberal’ type voters (sort of a Cameronite coalition) than the base of voters who backed the Conservatives in 2019, which is more attuned to ‘Loyal National’ type voters (overwhelmingly Leave voters). But at the moment, a large proportion of the pro-Sunak Remain voters tend to dislike the Conservative Party (more on this later) and are very happy voting Labour or Lib Dem - meaning much of that favourability may be ‘wasted’.

Meanwhile, Sunak’s weakness among Leave voters means voter apathy among Leavers continues to be high - not a single politician has a net positive rating with Leave voters at present (in YouGov’s data, at least). And indeed, Sunak’s weakness with Leavers opens up the space for Reform UK and Labour to take big chunks of the Tory Leave vote. Hence Labour’s sustained 20 point lead.

Sunak’s electoral inefficiency - explained through polling

Let’s dig a little deeper on this point. To do this I’ll stick to YouGov’s recent favourability data and most recent vote intention polling, mainly for simplicity, and to illustrate the point - but do note that I’ve carried out a similar comparison with data from other pollsters. And while house effects mean the numbers differ slightly between pollsters, the overall story is the same: Sunak has significant appeal among some Remain voters, which is not translating into Conservative votes from such voters.

To highlight this ‘inefficient brand’ issue, I’ve created a ‘theoretical vote ceiling’ metric. This vote ceiling is defined simply as ‘what the party’s vote intention would be if it matched the leader’s total favourability’. So the scores provided for this measure are simply the party’s current vote share (as indicated by polling) divided by the leader’s favourability overall or with Remainers/Leavers.

Obviously this is a very crude measure - and intentionally so. People do sometimes vote for parties despite disliking their leader, and sometimes people like both the Tory and Labour party leaders. The purpose of this metric is to provide a benchmark for how well a party is optimising its leader’s favourability, and the efficiency of turning this favourability into support for their respective parties.

As you can see, overall, Starmer is able to fairly efficiently convert his favourability into Labour votes, achieving 81.6% of the ‘theoretical ceiling’. Sunak, meanwhile, does not even achieve half - he’s stuck on 48.5%.

What’s going on here? Let’s break it down. 33% of the public are favourable to Sunak, and that splits into 29% among Remain voters, and 41% among Leave voters. This is a relatively even split - certainly compared to Starmer, whose appeal is much more lopsided at 59% among Remainers and 25% among Leavers. The problem is, in the current political landscape, an even split may suggest an inefficient split.

The elephant in the room here is Conservative support among Remain voters. Before excluding ‘don’t knows’, this is just 9% in this YouGov poll (and this is not an outlier - the YouGov poll a week prior to this put it at 10%), despite Sunak’s 29% favourability among Remainers - which makes for a dreadful conversion rate of 31%. And while Sunak has better numbers among Remainers (29% favourable) than Starmer does with Leavers (25%), Starmer is much better able to convert the Leavers who like him into voting Labour (giving Labour 19% of the Leave share before excluding ‘don’t knows’), meaning Labour achieve 76% of their ‘theoretical vote ceiling’ here.

Relative to Sunak’s appeal among Leave voters, the Conservative Party is actually picking up a decent level of support – with the party polling 73% of the ‘theoretical ceiling’ among Leavers. The problem is that Sunak is not very popular with Leavers in the first place - he’s favourable with 41% of them, while 59% of Remainers are favourable to Starmer. And indeed, Starmer manages to get a slightly better share - about 80% - of the ‘theoretical ceiling’ here too.

Sunak’s unpopularity with Leavers is a problem - because unless Sunak can activate Remainers who like him to vote Tory, in practice his okay-ish approval ratings don’t really help to improve Tory vote intention very much.

2. The Conservative ‘brand’ problem

So, getting to the crux of the issue, the question is: why is Sunak unable to convert Remainers who like him into Conservative votes?

One reason might be that those Remainers who like Sunak are spoilt for choice - many of them will also like Starmer, and will be voting Labour or Lib Dem instead.

But the answer becomes much more obvious when you consider strength of the Conservative Party brand. Here’s the same data as before, but looking at favourability of the parties themselves, rather than the leaders.

In short - in news that will surprise nobody, Remainers currently really dislike the Conservative Party. Just 15% of people who voted Remain are favourable to the Conservatives (81% unfavourable) - which makes for a healthier share of your ‘theoretical ceiling’, but that’s because the ceiling is so damn low in the first place that you’d have to crawl on the floor just to avoid hitting your head on it repeatedly.

So even though 29% of Remainers like Sunak, this does not count for much because many of those voters are very difficult for the party to convert into Tory votes - unless the Tory brand sees a dramatic improvement. Meanwhile, the ceiling looks pretty low among Leavers too - knowing that just 34% of Leave voters view the Conservatives favourably makes the 88% of their ‘ceiling’ that they achieve look pretty unimpressive.

Overall, just 22% of the public are favourable to the Conservatives, about double this are favourable to Labour (40%). All that’s happening here is – the Labour Party is somewhat popular, the Conservative Party is very unpopular. You don’t capture many votes through people liking you as a leader if they nonetheless dislike your party.

And worryingly for Sunak, this is one area where there has been no noticeable progress since Sunak became PM. In late October, 21% of the public were favourable to the Conservative Party (net-47) ; it is now 22% (net -44). Since then, Sunak’s numbers have worsened, but his party has stayed still.

And that really is the crux of the Conservatives’ current electoral malaise. This is why the Conservatives were 20 points behind in the polls 5 months ago, and why they’re still 20 points behind now. Simply and plainly, the public dislikes the party just as much now as it did then.

See here for part 2, where I discuss these points in more detail, and analyse the implications of this for Sunak and his party moving forward.

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