Swing voters are disengaged with the leadership election

A Holiday Inn Express near Southampton airport, a leafy London suburb, and a hotel complex just outside Oldham; not the locations for a new ITV drama, but instead where members of the public gathered to give their thoughts on the Conservative leadership election.

These were swing voters drawn from across the Conservative coalition, from working class people in Oldham, many of whom voted Conservative for the first time in 2019, those in Southampton who were undecided between Labour and the Tories, and participants in Esher who had voted Tory at the last election but were now tempted by the Lib Dems.

It is these groups of voters, that whoever triumphs in the leadership race must win over in two short years or face electoral defeat. On the back of our conversations, they have a long way to go.

Across all three groups, the level of political disillusionment was striking– the country was choosing its next prime minister, and it was literally passing these people by.

You don’t have to look far to find out what’s turning them off. From Hampshire to Greater Manchester, all they wanted to know is how the leadership candidates are going to help them with surging living costs. And they’re not hearing it, the ideological debates of leadership hustings a distant distraction, easily ignored.

It’s therefore not a surprise that these swing voters were ambivalent at best about our choices for next prime minister. Liz Truss, the frontrunner, had struggled to make a strong impression with any of them. Few could conjure much on her, a headteacher in the Esher area suggested she writes policies “on the back of a fag packet”. But, apart from the odd murmur about tax cuts, most knew next to nothing about her policies.

Rishi Sunak was more warmly received in the Tory Lib Dem marginal, his competence and prominent role during covid meant that people could imagine him as prime minister, and they at least knew a little more about him. Again, in Oldham, he had more familiarity than his rival and the furlough scheme was not forgotten.

But there was far from eager support. Nobody we spoke to was excited by the idea of a Rishi Sunak premiership, and perhaps more concerningly for him, it was the most conservative participants who had warmed to him least. In Southampton, as in Oldham, these voters instinctively referred to him as a “backstabber”, in a nod to his role in the downfall of Boris Johnson.

It was this finding that was perhaps the most telling. In our conversations, as has been the case all summer, Johnson loomed large in the background, an impossible to ignore figure. And unfortunately for both candidates, he remains a reasonably popular one with these voters. While the decline in trust in politics was lamented in all our conversations, neither candidate could convincingly demonstrate they were the one to rebuild it. Until that happens, many of these voters will continue to call for Boris.

Whoever wins the leadership race faces the mammoth challenge of immediately proving to a highly sceptical public that they can handle the cost-of-living crisis, or their time in office will be short lived. But to win the next election they must also break free of Boris Johnson’s shadow that still lingers heavily over their core support. Both unenviable challenges.