Speak to actual voters? It didn’t help much in the last general election

Getting in touch with voters too early made me more out of touch with public opinion. So this time I’m waiting until the final week before door knocking, and sticking to polls until then

Boris Johnson talks to a voter while canvassing in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire (AFP/Getty)

Everyone agrees that journalists ought to get out of their offices and talk to people to find out what is really going on. This is especially true in election campaigns, when we can be trapped in a bubble of TV, social media and opinion polls – we need to get out and talk to the voters, don’t we?

Well, up to a point. During the last election campaign I went out canvassing with some candidates. I particularly remember a Liberal Democrat target seat in the southwest, where nearly every voter said how utterly marvellous Theresa May was. One of the news stories that had cut through to these voters was Lib Dem leader Tim Farron’s views on gay sex – and the reaction was not favourable.

So that was useful in a way. I correctly concluded that the Lib Dems would fail to take back the seat. But overall, the effect of getting in touch with voters was to make me more out of touch with public opinion. The problem was that most of my time out on the road was in the early days of a seven-week campaign. That meant I gave too much weight to opinions I had heard at the start of the campaign, and I didn’t pay enough attention to polling evidence that things were changing – quite dramatically and quite quickly.

So, this time, I shall not pay too much attention to what people are saying until much closer to polling day. That final week will be the time to get out and join people knocking on doors, and to talk to people on the street and in (warmer) public places.

Until then, I will stick with the opinion polls, once I’ve worked out how to adjust them for the Brexit Party standing down in half the seats. And I do think focus groups are valuable, so I read the accounts of the ones carried out by Michael Ashcroft, the Tory peer and opinion researcher, as well as those carried out by Huffpost/Edelman and others.

Above all, they are a useful reminder of how little of the daily fuss and bother of political news filters through to people who are less obsessed with politics than I am.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator