Conservatives are currently reassuring themselves that a general election defeat is not inevitable because, as Nadine Dorries put it recently, ‘There is no love for Keir Starmer on the doorstep’. This line has been heard many times since the by-election defeats in Wellingborough and Kingswood last week. In the aftermath of those by-elections, the Conservatives pointed to the low voter turnouts and argued that Labour wasn’t adding any more votes to their 2019 totals. Some even said that so modest was Labour’s majority, that had Reform not stood in Kingswood, the Conservative candidate would have retained the seat.
There are even more crumbs of comfort for the Tories to glean from a new survey of 2019 Conservative voters published by Deltapoll yesterday. The poll confirms that just 14 per cent of former Tory voters plan to vote for Starmer at the next election and that Labour still needs to convince more of those who supported Boris Johnson if it is to make victory at the next general election secure.
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