This work was featured in The Guardian. It was conducted in partnership with IPPR.

What we wanted to find out

• Can we meaningfully surface - or reveal - key voters' priorities? What is the ‘record’ they will most reward and punish at the next election?
• What are people’s baseline attitudes to an array of possible wealth tax and borrow-to-invest ideas?
• What happens to these attitudes when they are exposed to different pro and anti messages?
• What are the narratives that push and pull opinion around on these subjects?
• To what extent, if at all, do popular progressive policies ‘accumulate’ in negative ways to the detriment of party brand? That is, is there an independent effect of the number of policies on the perception of a pary’s moderation, or is all the effect (if any) on the individual policies?

What we did

• A series of experiments over September and October 2024, comprising of Randomised Control Trial (RCT) message testing, conjoints, paired statement testing as well as more conventional approaches.
• Fieldwork for all of these was conducted via YouGov.
• Greater sample and methodology details for each experiment are available in the full research, which you can download above.

What we found

• The issue target voters will punish and reward the new Labour government on the most is public services. Tangible progress on this will be rewarded even if it comes with unpopular trade-offs (higher debt, deficits etc), while failure will be punished even if it comes with popular upsides (lower debts, deficits). Crucial switcher groups are especially motivated by the NHS.
• Both support for wealth taxation and the government’s political and economic brand appears relatively resilient to attack, should it adopt these ideas.
• There is some evidence that a positive message around rebuilding the public realm, especially the NHS, and restoring fairness in ‘who pays’ can bolster Labour’s brand with crucial switcher groups. But it is mostly the ends, not the means, that move voters.
• It is not all positive from a progressive perspective. Support for some policy ideas (eg reforming tax on pension contribution, raising NICs on employees) is more divided and vulnerable to opposition attack messages.
• Generally speaking, the narratives which pull people towards progressive positions here involve either utilitarian calls to re-build public services or values arguments around the fairness of asking more from those at the top when ordinary people are feeling squeezed. The arguments which push them away centre on ordinary people being hit. More abstract arguments about the economy seem less effective.
• There is no firm evidence that the number of ‘popular but left coded’ ideas Labour adopts has an independent effect on the government’s underlying brand, albeit there are caveats on this in relation to Conservative-to-Labour switchers and overall research design.

All research has limitations (nothing can perfectly recreate the information environment voters form opinions in) and should be taken with a pinch of salt, but we hold these conclusions with a fairly high degree of certainty.