Thoughts on the Tories, Libs and pundits ahead of the debate

By Tim Horton

I thought I’d offer three thoughts ahead of tonight’s debate, that have been bugging me all day.

On the Tories:

You’ll see Cameron hugging Trident close tonight, so to speak. But let’s not forget what the Telegraph’s excellent Andrew Pierce uncovered back in 2006 the Tories’ growing unease about Cameron’s relentless Hilton-driven PR strategy:

“There was also a dispute with Dr Liam Fox, the defence spokesman and former leadership challenger, who was astonished that Mr Hilton had used a focus group to test whether the party should support the case for replacing the Trident nuclear deterrent.”

Is there no decision too big to be sacrificed at the altar of PR expediency?

On the Libs:

I see the blogosphere today is rife with Lib Dems crying foul over the treatment meeted out to them by the tabloids. On a human level, I feel some sympathy for Clegg (though the Mail’s smears are not qualitatively different from the worst examples of local Lib Dem campaigning, which Cowley Street usually refuses to disown).

What I would just say to all Libs out there is this: today you have endured just one day of what Labour takes day-in, day-out from the right-wing press. Real three-party politics will arrive not with a poll-bounce in the absence of any kind of media scrutiny, but the maintenance of that bounce for months and years in face of this kind of intense media pressure. We’ll see…

On the pundits:

Tonight, as after the first debate, you’ll hear a lot of crap about the ‘worm’ – the real-time tracking of public sentiment towards the evolving action. Specifically, you’ll get pundits talking what these worm readings imply for what the parties should be doing or not. Certainly, this kind of opinion-tracking is invaluable for gauging audience reaction – and you can draw some conclusions from them about how to improve leader perceptions. But you can’t read across from the worm to party election strategy. Worm readings are ‘subjective’ – what people say they like. By contrast, parties are aiming to change people’s voting behaviour, and the most effective way to do this might not be saying things that people say they like. For example, volumes of studies from the US, like Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar’s excellent book Going Negative, show that huge numbers of US voters say they hate negative messages and ads. But they also show that negative messages are often by far the most powerful for influencing attitudes and behaviour. So let’s keep the worm in perspective tonight.