Exploring a 'cost of living populism'

Attached is:

• A full deck of results
• Two spreadsheets of MRP results - one for standard voting intention in each experiment condition and one for a squeeze-based voting intention. Both contain vote shares, seat projections and 2024 voter flows at national and seat level.

At the bottom of this page is a table where you can see the change in vote share observed in each seat when a 'cost of living populism' platform is attached to Labour in an election, per our experiment in wave two of the research. This research was co-funded by GFNE (Global Fund for New Economy).

What we wanted to find out

• What might an effective ‘cost of living populism’ retail offer look like? (wave 1 research)
• What is the electoral potency of a cost of living populism offer when attached to a party brand – in this case Labour – and how does it play out across the country? (wave 2 research)

What we did

• Wave 1 was conducted through a series of RCT vignette experiments and 'mocked environment' social media testing. We were looking at the sympathy each idea elicited among target voters, the change in vote share and crucially the ability to grab attention. In total we tested among over 19,000 UK voters in this wave.
• Wave 2 was conducted through RCTs and MRP methodology. In total we surveyed around 10,000 UK voters.

What we discovered

• On the criteria we set for ourselves, the most potent cost of living retail offer tends to combine a clear offer on buses (eg £1 bus fare or free for u-25s), water re-nationalisation, rent control and sectoral bargaining. There is also potential in student loan reform and a cap on essential energy use.
• The electoral potential of such an offer is large to any party, even an unpopular Labour government in this case. In this experiment, a cost of living populism platform lifted Labour by 15 percentage points to 34% and 358 seats - a majority of 66 and a gain of 263 seats on the current status quo trajectory.
• In the 124 battleground seats where Reform is a credible threat to Labour, 92 seats are retained by Labour compared to the 41 that would be retained if there was an election tomorrow.
• This upside largely sustains even when voters also see a counter-offer from the right, in this case a punchy Reform platform orientated around cultural populism, although it requires a squeeze message/tactical voting to do so. A squeeze election with Labour running on cost of living populism and Reform on a more cultural based populism sees Labour win by 42%-38%.

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