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Rishi Sunak’s warning of a Labour “supermajority” has struggled to cut through to the vast majority of Conservative voters, despite the prime minister making it a centrepiece of his campaign in the final days before Thursday’s poll.
Polling by Ipsos and the Financial Times published on Tuesday showed that a quarter of voters who said they were backing the Conservative party were doing so to prevent Labour winning a large majority.
Around 28 per cent of Tory voters said they were supporting Sunak because they feared tax increases if his party was removed from office.
After failing to close a 20-point gap with Labour during the election campaign, the Tories have shifted to urging voters to prevent Sir Keir Starmer’s party winning a victory that leaves only a stunted opposition.
In a campaign speech in the West Midlands on Monday, Sunak told supporters they had “four days to save Britain from a Labour government”. He said: “I tell you this: once you have handed Keir Starmer and Labour a blank cheque, you won’t be able to get it back.”
Yet while the message is intended to win back Tories who are considering backing smaller parties, the warning appears to be galvanising support for Labour among some voters.
Findings published by Techne UK last week found twice as many people said they were “more likely” to vote Labour — about 26 per cent — than back the Tories as a result of Sunak’s warning.
One in 10 potential Tory voters said the warning made them “more likely” to support Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, according to the Techne poll.
Keiran Pedley, research director at Ipsos, said the “supermajority” message reflected the poor state of the Tory campaign leading up to polling day.
“Nobody goes into an election campaign, however difficult, with a core message of don’t let the other side win by too much. It’s essentially a sign that everything else has failed,” Pedley said.
Ipsos earlier found that among 2019 Tory voters, two-thirds said that a Labour majority between 151 and 200 seats was a bad outcome. This compared with roughly half expressing negative sentiment towards a Labour majority up to 50 seats.
Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said that Sunak had “few straws to clutch” at this late stage of the campaign, but there was a risk his strategy was demotivating voters and encouraging some to back Reform.
But he added that others would be turned off by recent Reform developments, including comments by Farage that he admired Vladimir Putin as a political operator, and an undercover sting by Channel 4 revealing that a party activist in Clacton — the seat the arch-Brexiter is contesting — called Sunak a “fucking Paki”.
Bale added: “They were a potential protest vote for people who thought the government had failed, but the number of people who are actually racially prejudiced or fans of Putin is pretty small.”