With just 13 days to go, the Tories are changing strategy. For five years, the Conservative’s equation for the election was simple: leadership + economy = winning. Now David Cameron, Sir John Major, the Daily Mail and the Sun (or at least the non-Scottish version of it) speak constantly of Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP menace.
Why? Because either the Tories feel their original equation was wrong, or they believe the SNP X-factor in the election is so extraordinary that it changes everything.
But such late gambits are rarely effective. As the Tory campaign chief, Lynton Crosby, likes to say: “You can’t fatten a pig on market day.” Rather, they are a sign that something isn’t working if a campaign feels it needs to make a big change.
All of this comes back to the question of whether the Tories have the right messaging. Lee Atwater, the Reagan/Bush strategist, has said the key to good message strategy is to choose the ditch you’re going to die in – meaning that messages need to be chosen early and then stuck to because by election day either they will have been proved right or it is too late to choose otherwise.
The Tory “ditch” was supposed to be leadership and the economy. But Cameron weakened his leadership advantage by failing to turn up for the debates and has relied on an economic message far too triumphalist for the reality of the fragile recovery at hand. As a result, the ditch the Tories chose to die in may well result in electoral death rather than messaging victory.
Which leads us to the 11th-hour choice of the Tory high command to gamble on making the rise of the SNP the party’s big new argument. It is aimed at shoring up the Conservatives’ 2010 vote by winning back Ukip/Tory considerers and adding a few more 2010 Lib Dems to the Tory column in red v blue battleground seats.
As originally presented, this argument is likely to fail to connect with voters because it is too mired in process – “vote for my party to stop another party working with a third party after May 7” is just too complicated to have huge cut-through.
For even if polls show the SNP concern rising as a matter of interest to voters, it is important to differentiate between things voters tell pollsters they care about and things they base their vote on. The former may cover the SNP, the latter will be about leadership, the economy and the NHS.
That’s why it would be more effective for Conservative strategy to embrace the SNP argument as part of their original core messaging: leadership v weakness; economic recovery v budget chaos. In other words, use the SNP argument as an illustration of the original messaging equation (leadership + economy = winning) not an argument that stands on its own.
But the key weakness of Tory strategy remains: late changes in messaging are a sign that a party lacks confidence in their chance of victory. So the more the Tories pivot away from leadership and economy, and the more they try to make the whole election about the SNP, the more likely it is that they think they’ll lose. And the more confident Labour will be that the Tories picked the wrong ditch to die in.
