Branding the Tories totally around Theresa has made it easier for LAB>UKIP voters to move to the blues
Dealing with historic CON “nasty party” perceptions
We are not hearing the name Lynton Crosby much at the moment but he is playing the central role in the massive resurgence of the Conservatives that we are currently seeing.
He is very much a research-based campaigner and takes a lot of notice about the polls and detailed voter profiling that he is so good at.
At GE2015 his masterstroke was to exploit the fears that an EdM LAB government would be in the pocket of the SNP.
So one must assume that the attempt to brand the current Conservative campaign totally around Theresa May has come out of detailed research. One thing about Lynton Crosby is that he knows what he’s doing.
We all know the big story from overnight about how the UKIP vote has collapsed and almost all of those voters seem to have switched to the Conservatives. Now if you look at the history of where they have come from large numbers of UKIP backers have not been former CON voters but LAB ones.
So many of the UKIP supporters that Crosby has been trying to attract have no history of voting for the Conservatives before. So building the campaign around a party leader who is hugely popular leader seems a brilliant way of counteracting any historic “nasty Tory” perceptions.
This will run right through to June 8th. It is very much a presidential type campaign.