Has Cameron turned round the Tory brand?
One of the most commented on polling questions in conservative circles last year is question asked by Populus in March (though similar exercises have been done by ICM and YouGov) that asked two groups of people if they agreed with the Conservative party policy on immigration. One set of people were told it was Tory party policy, the other just had the policy described to them without attribution. The result that was the unattributed policy's net approval rate was 12 points higher than the attributed one - in other words, the Conservative party's image was so bad that people suddenly stopped liking policies when they found out they belonged to the Conservative party.
Populus have now repeated that experiment, using the 6 statements that David Cameron used in an advert in the Sunday Telegraph over the New Year. All six comments (you can read them in the Times here) are pretty bland and inoffensive, so unsurprisingly large majorities of people agree with them. The difference is that attributing the statements to David Cameron as leader of the Conservative party no longer automatically reduces the proportion of people supporting them.
The Times story unfortunately concentrates upon approval ratings - in the orginal Populus polls while approval ratings dropped once a policy was associated with the Tory party, the main difference was disapproval. People who would say "don't know" if asked about an unattributed policy would say they disapproved when it was described as a Conservative party policy. Populus's full figures though have the net approval ratings and the picture is the same - in most cases the Tory brand no longer seems to drag their policies down.
Of the 6 statements tested, the only one that was signficantly less popular when associated with the Conservatives was "Free trade must be matched by fairness and compassion. Fighting global poverty is our moral obligation; a priority, not an afterthought". Unattributed it's net approval was +74, attributed it was only +66. On the statements on helping the poor, standing up to big business and defending the NHS attributing comments to the Conservative party made no significant difference. On police reform and economic stability associating the comments with the Conservative party even seemed to increase their net approval rating slightly.
The figures aren't that conclusive - the statements were bland and designed to be quite hard to disagree with, there may be a different picture when it comes to firm policy positions. Equally, the exact wording of the question for the attributed statements was "made recently by David Cameron, the new Conservative Party leader” -
it could be that the Conservatives still have a negative image but it's being 'cancelled out by David Cameron's positive image. Still, it seem as though the Conservative party may not be the brand poison it used to be.
