The Tory Right and the perils of confirmation bias

There’s a poll out this morning that tells the Tory Right what they want to hear. I hope they listen to it – because it leads to an electoral cul-de-sac from which they might never escape. The failure of the Tories to appreciate the fact that is as plain as the nose on their collective face – that modernisation, rather than being a mistake, didn’t go far enough – is what is pulling them closer to the abyss.

The world has moved on, and so have the public.

But UKIP!? – I hear you cry. They’re potent – no doubt – and they’re on the up, but the Tories won’t win by apeing their disinterred Thatcherism. Why vote UKIP-lite when you can have the original? And wailing on about the questionable characters in UKIP isn’t much of an argument for a party who were quite happy to select homophobe (and now UKIP MEP) Roger Helmer to represent them.

The Tories can’t beat UKIP by sprinting rightwards.

But I hope they try.Those of us who live in hope of a more ambitious Labour Party know how the Tory Right feel this morning. We are regularly assailed by polls that say that if only Labour would introduce a Robin Hood tax/hike the minimum wage/repeal authoritarian anti-terror laws (delete as appropriate) then we’d be more popular. But people don’t decide on how to vote like that – and we should be afraid of polling that seems to tell us exactly what we want to hear, as Emma Burnell has memorably argued here before.

The problem is that confirmation bias ensures that you’ll focus on the stuff you agree with to the exclusion of the stuff you don’t. So for example you’ll see plenty of Tory backwoodsmen arguing in the coming days for a polling-endorsed “hard line on Europe, immigration and traditional families”, but precious few noting how unpopular a low tax state is, or how the public feel about welfare spending (they think it should be rising with inflation).

Elections aren’t decided by how voters feel about individual decisions. They’re decided by how voters feel about parties, and leaders. The only aim for any political party seeking to increase their vote share should be to expand the pool of potential voters by reaching outside of those who already vote for the party. That’s not just politics, it’s basic maths.

The next election could well be about “big data” as the 2012 US election was – building a complex and nuanced idea of what motivates the electorate. The alternative is that parties continue to rely on single data points in polls that tell them what they want to hear – leading to parties make theoretically popular decisions that merely reinforce negative views about them. If the Tories want to lurch towards “nasty party” territory, it may appear superficially sensible – but it’ll alienate the voters they need to win over to gain a majority.

I hope the Tory Right get their way.