How to follow the election

The five signals to watch amidst the noise

For political obsessives election campaigns are great fun. There are half-baked policy ideas to rip apart, polls to analyse, gaffes to laugh about. For most people they are roughly equivalent to a supermarket turning up the muzak. Yes you’re a bit more aware of its presence, but you’re still trying to block it out.

As such there are vanishingly few campaign moments that make a real difference. Even the ones committed to long-term political memory like Kinnock’s Sheffield rally speech or Gordon Brown calling Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman” on a hot mic, did not in fact have any significant impact.

But that doesn’t mean nothing ever changes during a campaign. This chart by Dylan Difford shows poll movement over every campaign since 1959:

In some campaigns nothing moves at all. 2001 was considered at the time extremely dull, but even campaigns like 1992 and 2015 which are remembered as exciting – because the final result was a surprise – saw little change. In both those cases the issue was simply that there was a systematic error in the polls, overstating Labour both times throughout.

When you do get change it often happens in the middle of the campaign (1983, 2010, 2017) rather than right at the start. So the fact there has been no movement in the week since the election was called – as Josh set out in our first election briefing email yesterday - doesn’t mean there won’t be.

Given, though, that so much of what happens in campaigns is just noise it can be hard to see these changes as they emerge. They are often missed or misinterpreted, as in 2017 where most commentators simply refused to believe that Corbyn’s Labour could be in with a chance. Moreover, there will be hundreds of polls bouncing around within the margin of error, with the occasional “rogue” one showing a bigger but phantom shift. Movement will be overinterpreted, leading to unnecessary panic or unjustified excitement.

To try and avoid getting caught up in this there are five “signals” I’m keeping a close eye on as we go through the campaign, which will indicate exactly how bad the Tory defeat is going to be.