Does Keir Starmer really have a "reverse Midas touch"? A YouGov experiment does not find such an effect on two policies tested – associating Keir Starmer's name with spending more on veterans and spending more on animal welfare made no difference to resultsyougov.co.uk/politics/art…
By contrast, associating Nigel Farage's name with a policy of spending more money on housing for veterans saw support fall from 69% to 60%, and on spending more on animal welfare from 60% to 54%yougov.co.uk/politics/art…
Beyond the toplines of our 'reverse Midas touch' experiment, we see that Labour/Lib Dem/Green voters in particular are less likely to support the two policies we tested when they were associated with Nigel Farageyougov.co.uk/politics/art…
One of the main reasons for David Cameron’s detoxification project was some polling in 2005 which showed a policy became less popular when the public found out it was a Tory policy and I’ve also placed much faith in this type of polling.
Given the quasi-presidential nature of our general election we have in this country this polling shows that Nigel Farage can be damaging to a policy more than Sir Keir Starmer.
This fits my expectation that there could a level of tactical anti Reform voting that would be very damaging to them.