Dr Patrick English is the Director of Political Analytics at YouGov.
Ahead of the local election results last Thursday, Rishi Sunak was keen to push attention to what he highlighted as two key races that this election-year ballot box test ought to be judged on: the Tees Valley and West Midlands mayoral elections.
Both positions were, until that vote, held by high-profile, well-known Conservatives, Ben Houchen and Andy Street. Both were seeking re-election for a third term (as was Sadiq Khan in London).
The polling released in the week ahead of the vote appeared to vindicate Sunak’s attention push: while expectations were broadly unanimous in predicting a tough, tough night for the Conservatives in terms of the local authority results, pollsters predicted a close race (too close to call, in fact) in the West Midlands and a close shave for Houchen in Tees Valley.
In the end, the polls were entirely correct: Labour’s eventual win in the West Midlands came down to just 1,500 votes, while Houchen defended his position but suffered a 17-point swing to Labour in the process.
While Labour will no doubt be delighted with taking the West Midlands mayoralty, and with the hammering that the Conservatives indeed did take in council elections across England, there was some small encouragement for the Conservatives in those two high-profile races.
This was that both Street and Houchen were clear beneficiaries of a very strong personal vote. Better still, as both the West Midlands and (most of) Tees Valley held police and crime commissioner elections on the same day, we can quantify it.
In the West Midlands, while the mayoral election ended up a dead heat at 38 per cent apiece for Labour and the Conservatives, Labour easily won the West Midlands PPC election by 15 points (58 per cent to 43 per cent). Similarly, while Houchen managed to beat his Labour challenger by 54 per cent to 41 per cent, Labour swept to victory in the Cleveland PPC election (which covers three quarters of the mayoralty boundaries) by six points (53 per cent to 47 per cent).
Strong evidence, therefore, that both candidates enjoyed a significant personal vote.
Personal votes matter hugely in electoral politics, particularly when parties are looking to defend seats. This is because they translate into what electoral (data) analysts call “incumbency effects”: an added bonus to party vote shares within constituencies based on whether or not the MP who holds the seat is standing for re-election.
These bonuses are usually a product of a few sources, but are mainly down to a combination of name recognition and the construction of a ‘winning mentality’ around the candidate – if they won last time, they can win again (which can’t, for the majority of cases, be said of a challenger).
Current research differs on estimates of how large incumbency effects in general elections actually are. Certainly, they are not typically of the size that Houchen and Street seemed to enjoy in their respective re-election attempts. After all, the mayoral positions are designed and set up to encourage personal votes and more independent-minded candidates, which is exactly what they have done.
We can, however, appeal to a couple of recent British general election results to get a sense of how big we might expect incumbency advance to be for the Conservatives this time around.
In the 2019 general election, the swing to the Conservatives was a full two points less where a Labour incumbent was standing versus where they were not; in 2017, when the Conservatives were on the back foot, the vote share swing to Labour was reduced by around one point where a Conservative party incumbent was standing.
What could that mean for a 2024 general election? Well, that will depend on how many Conservative incumbents there actually end up being. According to the latest figures from the House of Commons Library, 65 Conservative MPs have announced their intention not to contest the next general election. That’s 62 per cent of all MPs standing down.
With so many current Conservative MPs withdrawing, and many of those who are re-standing doing so in either partially or entirely new constituencies, there may be limited opportunities for Tories to actually benefit from an incumbency bonus.
We also still don’t know the full list of those Conservative MPs standing down at the next election; more are expected to announce they are stepping down ahead of the next nationwide ballot. This makes it difficult to draw conclusions are to what sort of incumbency effect the Conservatives might benefit from that could stem the Labour tide in seat-level modelling.
However, what we can say is that in YouGov’s latest MRP model, which projected Labour to win over 400 seats, 33 constituencies were called for Labour over the Conservatives by a margin less than the suggested two-point swing that incumbency was worth to Labour in 2019.
That’s hardly an election-changing figure while the Labour lead remains where it is in national polling. Assuming all of those 33 seats featured a Conservative incumbent (they do not), that would reduce the Labour majority projected by the latest YouGov MRP from 154 seats to 90 in the absolute best-case scenario.
But if the polls did narrow closer toward a hung parliament scenario (which, for clarity, they absolutely do not currently imply), and if a significant number of seats on that marginal line did all feature Conservative incumbents, it could make a real difference to the outcome – or, at least, to the size of the majority that Sir Keir Starmer and Labour are able to enjoy post-election.
As it stands, however, with so many Conservative MPs standing down (or having resigned or been forced out already) in many of those battleground seats, incumbency is a difficult and unstable set of stilts for the Conservatives to build an electoral strategy on.
The post Patrick English: Incumbency effects – how many personal votes could there be for Tory MPs? appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Dr Patrick English
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