Headline figures in an opinion poll can be confusing, and at times misleading. If you want an example of that, then you could scarcely do better than the polling released this week by the electoral commission, which purported to analyse Irish people’s attitudes to the two referenda and the local and European elections held this year.
For example, the polling found a considerable gap between how people voted in those referenda, and how they told pollsters they voted. Forty one per cent of those polled claimed to have voted yes in the family referendum, but in the real world, only thirty two per cent of people did. So either about 10% of people just flat lied to the pollster about how they had voted, or the poll was flat wrong. Given that the poll was conducted by Red C, and given that the sample size was a very large three thousand people, the former explanation – that voters are not always entirely honest – seems more likely.
That’s one example of where a poll can mislead you. There are other examples too.
That same research, for example, found that 28% of Irish voters self-identify as being either slightly right wing, or right wing. This, patently, does not tell the full story – not least because we have no idea what the voters meant when they said they were “right wing”.
In my experience, in Ireland, the phrase “right wing” might broadly be applied to four distinct groups of people. The first, and those most prominently associated with the term, are probably what Fintan O’Toole would call the remnants of the ancien regime: People who still closely associate their worldview with that of their (usually) catholic religion. These are the voters who opposed same sex marriage and abortion, vote “no” in most EU referendums because they see the EU as a vehicle for social liberalism, and are deeply concerned with things like the liberalisation of the sex education curriculum in schools.
Yet these people also tend to be quite left wing on a range of areas: You’ll find that they, compared to their international peers, tend to be much more sympathetic to the Palestinians than the Israelis. You’ll find that they’re often in favour of more social spending and higher taxes on the rich. You’ll find that they’re often staunchly republican and identify more with the losing side in Ireland’s civil war. In fact if you took social policy out of the equation altogether, these voters would be more at home in the Labour Party than they would be in a “traditionally” right of centre party like Fine Gael. Many of these voters, it seems to me, have settled on Aontú, while still describing themselves as “right wing”.
Then there’s a second group: These voters tend to be the exact opposite of the first group, favouring much more internationalism and free trade and the EU, favouring lower taxes and spending by the Government, and seeing Ireland as a free trading capitalist outpost whose prosperity is closely tied to a liberal economic policy. They believe in the free movement of people, and are much more relaxed about immigration. They are sceptical of Irish neutrality, largely pro-western, and solidly behind Ukraine while being more nuanced than the average Irish voter on Israel. On the flipside, most of these voters are also social liberals, who believe firmly in the separation of church and state. These people are numerous, normally middle class, and have had real political success with the Progressive Democrats and then in latter years with Fine Gael. Most of these voters have stuck with the political establishment, and have no real reason as yet to switch from it.
The third, and newest group, are what American political scientists have taken to calling “barstool nationalists”. They tend to be disproportionately male and disproportionately focused on cultural issues (as distinct from social issues). For these voters, so-called “wokeness” and immigration are at the very top of the agenda. They’re concerned about things like free speech, the perceived rise of political islam in the west, and while they likely voted for gay marriage, they’re increasingly annoyed at having rainbow flags visible everywhere they go and being told to put pronouns in their linkedin bios. These voters tend to not be very religious, and can be distinguished from the first group by having very little time for the priorities of the religious right. They have no desire, for example, to restrict access to pornography, would be very relaxed about the further liberalisation of divorce laws, and would probably be closer to the centre ground on issues like cannabis legalisation or matters of sexual morality. Their hostility to the EU derives much more from issues like immigration and free speech and globalisation and wokeness than it does to any principled opposition to the EU’s existence, and they’d be pretty comfortable in an EU dominated by their own views. You’ll probably find these voters more in the space occupied, during the local and EU elections, by parties like Independent Ireland or some of the smaller factions.
Finally, there’s the smallest group: Saps like me who consider themselves broad-spectrum conservatives and draw from elements of all three, thus regularly getting in trouble with one faction or the other for being insufficiently purist on one of their hobby horses.
These four groups of voters – or at least the first three – are almost impossible to reconcile with each other, as opposed to voters on the left who tend to share the same broad set of priorities and thus can coalesce more easily around political choices. For example, there isn’t really a hair’s breadth between the policies of Labour, the Green Party, and the Social Democrats – differences on the left tend to be more tonal and cosmetic than they are substantive.
As such, the idea that there’s a 28% strong bloc of “right wing voters” just waiting to be won over is, despite what the poll says, mostly nonsense. Within that bloc there are radically different views on immigration, abortion, taxation, neutrality, foreign policy, the European Union, and a range of other issues. This simply is not true on the left.
Polls, as such, only tell you half the story.