To wonder why if the tories are so unpopular, they always get in?

[maggiethemagpie]

Are there a lot of secret Tory voters who won't admit it? They have won most elections since the second world war, so they must be doing something right (in terms of appealing to the electorate to continuously vote for them) yet I see a lot of Tory bashing threads on here and I don't know anyone in my own life who'd admit to voting Tory.

I'm not particularly a leftie, I'm a centrist if anything and believe a balance of left and right leaning politics is optimal, but it seems like it is very 'right on' to admit to a socialist view and wanting to do more for society's vulnerable or poor, but to admit to admiring conservative views is not acceptable. You hear of 'Tory Scum' but never 'Labour Scum'.

So who are all these people voting for the conservatives? Because they always seem to get in, and the Blair years when they did not, people say Blair was a red Tory anyway!

Or are people just afraid to admit what their political views are if it does not sound socially acceptable?

teofalls

I will try and dig it out. I get so much crap on my Twitter and FB that it soon gets lost.

Might be easier on a comp rather than mobile.

Can't do links on my phone () but on reddit I found the stat that under the FPTP system Leavers would have won 68.8% of the vote vs 31.2% obviously.

It's a balance. Labour spends all the money and puts us in debt but for usually genuine reasons. When the debt gets too big we vote for a different party to sort it all out. The tories sort out the over spending but then have to take the blame for being the misers, which is a lot unfair.

Why doesn't Labour leave the tories lots of money so they can be father xmas for once.

I am a previous Blair voter but now cant vote labour because they have gone all mental. The tories are fast and efficient at sorting out a new leader. Hopefully its a woman.

peachpudding Apparently a political journo on the BBC said today that if the two front-runners in the MPs’ voting whose names went to the membership were both women “there could be another female Prime Minister”.

Well, yes, I suppose there could!

A previous Blair voter who hopes it will be a woman . . . well, they say that Tony was a great admirer of the Iron Lady. There is some irony in the fact that the party which did most to resist women's suffrage (but also reduced the age to 21, as for men, in 1928) should have provided the first and probably the second woman PM. It's a pity it wasn't Barbara Castle - I can't say the same for Harriet Harman.

Peach why has the deficit gone up under the Tories then?
Harsh austerity doesn't work or help the economy.

The polling companies had a detailled investigation after the 2015 election into why they often underestimate the Tory vote
http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/3789/1/Reportfinall_revised.pdf

The main cause was that polling companies struggle to get representative samples, under the limitations of time & resources they have available to do the poll, e.g.

• It's not so much "shy Tories" as busy "Tories" - companies don't have the resources to keep chasing those who don't answer the phone or door, e.g. Tories had an 11-pt lead among those who needed 3+ visits to reach.
• Wrt online polls, Tories average older than Labour, so less active online, especially the important 70+ group
• Polls try to measure how likely people are to vote, but they keep sampling the more politically engaged younger age group, who are not typical of their generation.

All companies try to mathematically weight for this - If you look at raw polling data, it looks more towards Labour than what they actually publish. However, in some elections they still didn't weight enough.

A MORI spokesperson said: “If you look at the opinion polls at all of the elections since 1959, on average the polls have overstated the Labour share of the vote by 1.4%. The difficulty is that it hasn’t happened at every election. Our 2005 and 2010 results were pretty good"

"Labour leave the tories lots of money so they can be father xmas for once. "

You ignore the fact that the Conservatives were in power for 3 consecutive terms in the 80s and 90s. Again, Labour have not been in power since 2009.

And the Conservatives do play Father Xmas. They just play it to a different section of the population, whom they shower with tax breaks and shares from privatisation.

The famous 'no more money' note in the treasury was actually a joke - similar jokes are often made from the outgoing Government to the incoming one.
Perhaps the Lib-dem who leaked it needed a *LIGHT-HEARTED" message written across the top. I suppose, since the Lib-dems are rarely elected to Government, he didn't understand.

Oh Tanith thank you it's good to start the day with a laugh out loud

The famous 'no more money' note in the treasury was actually a joke - similar jokes are often made from the outgoing Government to the incoming one

It might have been left as a joke but unfortunately it was true. The budget deficit was enormous. So not that funny as a joke really.

We aren't unpopular! Perhaps you are choosing the wrong friends. There are loads of Tories out there, thankfully.

I've always voted conservative. I am a secret Tory? No, not really. I just chose to keep my policitical opinions to myself and not blazen them everywhere for all to see.in fact tge only people I know in my circle of family and frends that don't vote conservative are my sister and BIL. Everyone else I know votes conservative.

The Tories have taken the mantle from the Labour party of representing the working man. These days all labour seems to be about are protest issues. Most Tory voters are to busy living their lives to bother engage in pointless political discourse.

As a conservative i actually think Jeremy Corbyn is good for the labour party. He is a proper National Socialist (not in the nazi way!) with backbone and morals and i truly think he has the ability to win back labours credibility with average working people. The rest of his party seem like a bunch of pinko flip flopping protesters in comparison.

All this stuff about Labour spending all the money and Tories "rescuing us" every time is a lovely story, but it isn't backed up by any facts. Not least as the current (Tory) lot have subjected the poorest to massive cuts for no reason other than ideology and haven't cut the debts.

Did you know that the overall burden of taxation, both in real money and as a percentage of gdp actually increased during the Thatcher years? Yet the already wealthy were given massive income tax cuts while the poor were slapped with huge regressive increases in unavoidable taxes like VAT. The Major government even slapped VAT on utilities after lying and saying they wouldn't.

People have short and selective memories.

The budget deficit was enormous.

And after years of punishing the poorest, it still is. Gideon has missed every single one of his own targets, yet the Tories are supposed to be "safe" and "competant" with the economy? Pull the other one.

Has any tory voter been willing to explain why they still support tories even after their dreadful cuts to disability payments? It is usually ignored.

I always vote labour

I was very much against the Iraq war but is still voted for them

Thought I couldn't vote for Corbyn

You Tory voters do get a lot of abuse, don't you?

I reckon one of the main reasons is that it isn't trendy to be a Tory voter. People like bandwagons. It's like it's popular right now on social media to be a Corbynite, or to kick off that Blair is a war criminal who should be hanged. Much of the public localish to me think Corbyn's an unelectable knob and think Blair was right - please note, I may or may not agree with these opinions, just going by people I speak to as opposed to what I see online.

The budget deficit is £1.64 trillion, it was 960 billion when Labour left office.

So, yeh, hopefully we can lay the whole Tories Are Good With The Economy myth to bed. Particularly after the cluster fuck that the referendum was.

It's very trendy amongst people I know to vote Tory actually.
Same with remain - in London I don't know anyone except one person who voted to leave and yet others in other parts of the country will say they didn't know anyone voting to remain. Iut just depends on your circles... and yes the Tories have not been anything like radical enough. It's pathetic but they are the best of the bunch.

As a conservative i actually think Jeremy Corbyn is good for the labour party. He is a proper National Socialist (not in the nazi way!) with backbone and morals and i truly think he has the ability to win back labours credibility with average working people. The rest of his party seem like a bunch of pinko flip flopping protesters in comparison.
I totally agree. (apart from the pinko bit of course)

Corbyn is excellent for the Conservative Party. Tessa will eat him for breakfast and spit out the bits.

how radical do you want them to be girl?

And why if the Tories are so good with the economy is our national debt the highest for years? Despite austerity.

Whilst I'm sure most can't be so neatly pigeon-holed, the 'out' tories I know are;

My grandparents (in their 80s)
My dad, a vocal racist who has also voted BNP.
My partner's step father who's racism would make my own father blush.
My 3 richest friends, who inherited their wealth. One of these 3 believes that anyone who claims any benefits is a scrounger (including the severely disabled), another is a woman who believes a woman's place is in the home, and the third was a leftie until she inherited a couple of million.

I'm sure this isn't, and cannot be, representative of all Tory voters, but it's enough to put me off!