Can Rishi win?

It’s been just over two weeks since Boris Johnson announced his resignation, and the initial flurry of early polling on his potential successor has started to coalesce. The two candidates left standing, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, will have their teams pouring over the available data. And for both sides, the numbers suggest the contest will be a punishing one.

There are three key trends which can be identified so far, and these trends pose a difficult choice for those Conservative party members voting for the new prime minister. First: Truss has enjoyed a consistent and significant lead over Sunak in all but one of the seven polls of party members conducted so far. This is unusual given the pattern which played out in the parliamentary round of the contest – Sunak was the favourite throughout balloting, yet Truss has emerged as the preferred candidate of the rank and file.

The second trend is that the pool of undecided party members is dwindling. Barring the most recent poll of 21 July – which saw an increase (likely from those members for whom neither candidate is an appealing prospect, and who will now fall into the ‘won’t vote’ column) – the number undecided has declined quickly. In the immediate wake of Johnson’s resignation, 19 per cent to 30 per cent of members were undecided in a possible Truss-Sunak run-off. Earlier this week, those figures fell to around 10 per cent. Members are making their minds up.

The third trend is that the opposite picture is playing out among the general public. Here, Sunak is more popular than Truss. In eight favourability or approval polls, not one gave Truss a lead over the former Chancellor. Sunak’s lead ranged from 2 per cent to 23 per cent, with an average of 12 per cent.

Together, these point to some difficult decisions for party members. The current impression is that Truss is most likely to win the leadership and the premiership but will stumble at the next general election. Sunak is better placed to win a general election but has major work to do to gain party support.

Sunak’s team will feel a sense of urgency. At present, he is unlikely to win with the membership. CCHQ has already announced a schedule for regional hustings, but with a shrinking pool of undecided voters, there is a real danger of not being able to turn the electorate around fast enough.

This doesn’t mean that members won’t switch camps – many will over the next six weeks. But it’s harder to win votes from a rival camp than from a group who have yet to make their minds up. This tension creates a greater role for negative campaigning over the course of the contest.

In the scramble to make up ground, Sunak will push the narrative that he is the only candidate capable of defeating Starmer when the time for a general election comes. Success here will depend on the membership’s responsiveness to arguments about electability, and there is reason to believe this is a secondary consideration – in a recent YouGov poll of 855 Conservative party members, just three per cent chose ‘electability; when asked what they are looking for in a new leader.

There will be other avenues the Sunak camp will take as they look to discredit Truss, beside appealing to electoral pragmatism. A battle has already begun over fiscal policy, and Sunak is well placed to deliver credible and damaging criticisms of Truss’s plan for tax cuts. The Foreign Secretary, meanwhile, is making a case for growth which could cut through with party members.

Truss has also shown herself to have no qualms with criticising the economic direction taken by the former Chancellor during their time together in cabinet. Economic policy is a key battleground for winning over the membership. For those seeking a return to ‘conventional conservatism,’ 32 per cent defined this as ‘reduce tax and spend’ and 16 per cent as ‘economic prosperity/management.’ Looking at the polling, and the path each candidate needs to take to win, it seems unlikely that their differences can be resolved amicably.