How do voters feel about the economy?

Now that we’re in election season, tracking the horse race between the dominant political parties will become the favourite sport of many political enthusiasts, but there’s much to learn from going deeper than vote intention to understand the perspectives, opinions, and experiences that actually motivate voters.

From 7 to 22 May 2024, we surveyed 2,012 British adults and dug into how the British population currently views the economy and their finances, giving us a pre-election snapshot of the electorate’s subjective economic views.

Key findings:

• A majority of voters think the Conservative government is doing more harm to both the economy as well as their personal finances than they are helping. Even 1 out of 4 Conservative voters think this government is hurting their personal financial situation.

• Most voters think that taxes are currently too high, while also believing that the financial support from a number of specific benefit programs (such as state pensions and carer benefits) are too low.

• A majority of voters who switched from the Conservatives since 2019 feel worse off financially compared to 5 years ago. These voters are also especially likely to say that this government is harming their personal financial situation.

Let’s start out with a clear and unsurprising finding: a majority of the public thinks the current government is harming the economy (55%) as well as their own personal finances (57%). Fewer than 1 in 5 people think the government is have a positive impact on the economy (18%) or their financial situation (13%). Even a quarter of current Conservative voters think the government is having a negative impact on their personal finances. Of course, most of those who think the government is doing well by the economy or their pocketbooks are currently voting Conservative, but still, only half of Tory voters think they’re helping the economy and only a third of those voters think they’re helping their own finances.

What was once a clear advantage for the Tory brand has become an albatross. Obviously, this paints a dire situation for the Conservatives since they can no longer rely on an issue area that has been a historical strength for them. 

Of course, voters who have turned away from the Conservatives since the last General Election in 2019 are of particular interest at this early phase of the campaign. Let’s look at those voters who have switched from the Tories to supporting another party or being undecided. Those swing voters are especially likely to say that the government is harming their personal finances, with 61% saying they’re doing either a little or a lot of harm.

It’s very possible that these are pocketbook voters, who have been especially impacted by the economic turmoil of the last few years. Those are the types of voters who are disproportionately swayed by how their personal circumstances have changed and less impacted by the societal level ideological debates. Despite the recent positive news about inflation rates returning to normal levels, these voters won’t yet have sensed any impact on their personal finances, and so they’re still blaming the government for the economic turbulence they’ve been feeling in recent years. 

When it comes to taxes, these opinions are especially revealing of a specific group of voters: Reform UK supporters. These attitudes set this group apart from the rest of the population. Reform UK voters are particularly likely to say that current tax rates are far too high as well as just generally too high (67%). It’s worth noting that this group of voters are a relatively small subset of nationally representative polls, and so larger sample sizes will be needed, during this election cycle, to provide more precise estimates of their attitudes and to what extent that sets them apart from other groups in the electorate. 

Very few voters in any group think taxes are too low, and currently, Liberal Democrat supporters are the most likely to say that with 14% of those voters saying tax rates are too low or far too low, while only 7% of voters overall think that.

So those voters who have left the Conservatives for Reform UK will be more receptive to messaging around tax cuts, but no one is especially receptive to the idea that taxes should go up. Of course, the question remains if various voter groups want taxes increased on other people.

In the spirit of eating their cake and having it too, a number of different benefit programmes are currently viewed as underfunded by the British population. The British electorate rated state pensions, carer benefits, and to a lesser degree, disability benefits as the most under-funded benefit programmes. While a quarter of the public thinks unemployment benefits are too high (and this was the highest response for the benefit programmse we tested), a slightly larger proportion of the population (30%) also think those benefits are too low.

While a plurality of voters generally think that child benefits are “about right” (39%), opinions on this benefit reveal a bit of nuance between different types of swing voters. Voters who have switched from the Tories in 2019 to Labour now are the least likely group to see child benefits as too high, with only 8% thinking this, while voters who switched from the Tories in 2019 to Reform UK now are the most likely to see these benefits as too high, with 37% feeling that way about child benefits. Again, these sub-samples of swing voters are relatively small, and bigger samples would be needed to confirm the precise level of these opinions. 

Lastly, let’s take a look at a fairly classic question posed to voters at an election: Are you better or worse off today than you were at the last election? This is a classic subjective measure of how people are feeling financially viewed through the context of an electoral timeframe. The actual or objective sense of someone’s finances is not what we’re concerned with here. This question is meant to uncover how people feel financially, especially since other studies have found that such subjective sensibilities are more closely linked to our political attitudes and decisions than objective financial facts are. 

So how do voters feel they’re doing compared to 5 years ago? Generally, not great. About half of the public (48%) feel less financially comfortable, compared to about a quarter of the population (27%) who say they feel more financially comfortable than 5 years ago. Over half of Labour and Reform UK voters feel worse off, while Conservative (and to a slightly lesser degree Liberal Democrat) voters are more likely to feel better off, with about a third of each party’s supporters (36% and 31% respectively) feeling more financially comfortable.

So what does this all mean? It’s true that current Conservative voters are more likely to have a positive economic outlook, especially in terms of their party, and yet it’s not at the level you’d want among your supporters at the beginning of an election. Looking at the British population overall, this is a considerably downtrodden electorate in terms of their economic and financial feelings. We shouldn’t expect these feelings to change dramatically over the course of the next 6 weeks until polling day, partially because the economy won’t shift majorly in the next 6 weeks, but also because people need time to adjust their subjective understanding of such things as the economy and their finances — and that’s one thing snap elections don’t allow for: time. So if voters are going to return to the Conservative Party they will need to be convinced by something else besides the Tories’ record on the economy. 

View the tables for this polling here.

"British Money and magnify glass" by Images_of_Money is licensed under CC BY 2.0.