The Times Op-Ed: A guide to electionspeak
By David Rowan
DO YOU speak poll-ish? While the politicians struggle tediously to out-euphemise each other on immigration, the opinion pollsters in this campaign have all the best lines. Let the candidates contrive ever more bogus synonyms for "race": the freshest linguistic creations this time round are being coined by the forecasters.
With all their talk of drawbridge issues and tactical unwinds, the number crunchers' slang is proving unusually revealing. For one thing, Bashful Blairities have replaced Shy Tories as the voting group the pollsters find hardest to fathom. Suddenly embarrassed to admit that they might vote Labour, they are keeping to themselves their guilty secret. "It's what we call the spiral of silence theory," explains Nick Sparrow at ICM. "Because your party is so unpopular, you're more inclined to keep quiet, which we're finding more now among Labour voters than Conservatives."
A further Labour challenge lies in evidence of tactical unwind - the tendency, named by the psephologist John Curtice, for those previously voting tactically against a Conservative candidate to abstain this time or switch away from Labour. Then again, there is always the Palmer paradox to consider, an aspect of voters' psychology articulated by Nick Palmer, defending Broxtowe for Labour. If it appears that the Conservatives might win, Palmer asserts, disaffected Labour voters will turn out in force to prevent them. But if the Tories are generally assumed to be sunk, apathy might actually let them win.
The Palmer paradox has been much discussed this week on the PoliticalBetting.com website, as has another factor that may shift the election odds, the GMWs. These, if you didn't already know, are the Guardian Men and Women, supposedly former Labour voters now liable to go Lib Dems. Don't confuse them, by the way, with the thwarted idealists or the grousers, distinct groups identified by MORI as particularly significant. The former comprise former Labourites who may simply stay at home, the latter "grumpy southerners who tend to moan about everything" but could turn a few key marginals.
It is not all bad news for Labour, which has benefited substantially from twizzling in recent days. Here, you have to understand that national ignominy has only boosted the sales of Turkey Twizzlers. As one Labour candidate explained yesterday, "The more befuddled we are, the better we seem to be doing. It's great."
Can these linguistic insights alone help to predict the May 5 result? Probably not, given all the dog-whistling and campaign re-engineering still to come. But it might, at least, help the parties to sort out their priorities, suggests Simon Atkinson of MORI. "Labour's thwarted idealists need to be galvanised to stop the tactical unwind by promoting the nose-peg vote," he says. If you know what he means.
(The Times, April 23 2005)
DO YOU speak poll-ish? While the politicians struggle tediously to out-euphemise each other on immigration, the opinion pollsters in this campaign have all the best lines. Let the candidates contrive ever more bogus synonyms for "race": the freshest linguistic creations this time round are being coined by the forecasters.
With all their talk of drawbridge issues and tactical unwinds, the number crunchers' slang is proving unusually revealing. For one thing, Bashful Blairities have replaced Shy Tories as the voting group the pollsters find hardest to fathom. Suddenly embarrassed to admit that they might vote Labour, they are keeping to themselves their guilty secret. "It's what we call the spiral of silence theory," explains Nick Sparrow at ICM. "Because your party is so unpopular, you're more inclined to keep quiet, which we're finding more now among Labour voters than Conservatives."
A further Labour challenge lies in evidence of tactical unwind - the tendency, named by the psephologist John Curtice, for those previously voting tactically against a Conservative candidate to abstain this time or switch away from Labour. Then again, there is always the Palmer paradox to consider, an aspect of voters' psychology articulated by Nick Palmer, defending Broxtowe for Labour. If it appears that the Conservatives might win, Palmer asserts, disaffected Labour voters will turn out in force to prevent them. But if the Tories are generally assumed to be sunk, apathy might actually let them win.
The Palmer paradox has been much discussed this week on the PoliticalBetting.com website, as has another factor that may shift the election odds, the GMWs. These, if you didn't already know, are the Guardian Men and Women, supposedly former Labour voters now liable to go Lib Dems. Don't confuse them, by the way, with the thwarted idealists or the grousers, distinct groups identified by MORI as particularly significant. The former comprise former Labourites who may simply stay at home, the latter "grumpy southerners who tend to moan about everything" but could turn a few key marginals.
It is not all bad news for Labour, which has benefited substantially from twizzling in recent days. Here, you have to understand that national ignominy has only boosted the sales of Turkey Twizzlers. As one Labour candidate explained yesterday, "The more befuddled we are, the better we seem to be doing. It's great."
Can these linguistic insights alone help to predict the May 5 result? Probably not, given all the dog-whistling and campaign re-engineering still to come. But it might, at least, help the parties to sort out their priorities, suggests Simon Atkinson of MORI. "Labour's thwarted idealists need to be galvanised to stop the tactical unwind by promoting the nose-peg vote," he says. If you know what he means.
(The Times, April 23 2005)
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