Note: This piece was written before last night’s rather funny development in the Presidential election. There’ll be more on Jim-Gavin-gate later this morning when Sarah and I do an emergency podcast on the topic. Expect that around lunchtime.
Nevertheless much of this piece remains, I think, relevant:
You always know it’s bad when they’re denying the polls.
A Jim Gavin-backing Fianna Fáil employee of long standing, with whom I am in regular text contact with, likes to educate me from time to time on the ways of politics. He’s a nice fella and I enjoy our banter, but find his arrogance endlessly amusing – as if working for a party that has shed over 50% of its support during his career with them makes him the expert and me the novice.
Yesterday, his response to a question about the Sunday Independent’s latest Presidential Opinion poll, showing his man in an anemic third place, was a two-word reply: “Joke Pollster”.
This is, of course, an unfounded calumny against Ireland Thinks and its chief pollster Kevin Cunningham, whose short track record polling Irish politics has been unequivocally good, and who consistently produces some of the most interesting data out there.
But the assertion reveals something inherent to the Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael mindset: That, come polling day, the public will come to its senses, and the traditional order will reassert itself. As a Fine Gaeler put it to me last week – long before this weekend’s poll – “middle Ireland just isn’t going to elect Catherine Connolly”.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that, mate.
For me the most interesting question in yesterday’s poll wasn’t the “who are you voting for” question. It was, instead, the “who won the debate?” question. Let me tell you why: Because we humans are partisan, biased beings.
When you support a candidate and are really invested in them, you’ll do anything you can to help them. Including, very regularly, bare-facedly lying to opinion pollsters. Fine Gaelers will always rush to tell pollsters and anyone else who might listen that their man was brilliant, even if he’s had his pants pulled down and his arse reddened for him live on national television. Sinn Feiners are worse again for this. Fianna Fáilers in my experience are more relaxed, but still a little biased and perfectly capable of some self-serving delusion.
So, here’s what that question revealed: Six per cent of voters said Heather won the debate. Five per cent said Jim.
The significance here is not that eleven per cent of the voters are shameless liars. It is that only eleven per cent of the voters are shameless liars.
The two stooges are so unpopular that barely anybody could be bothered lying to a pollster that they thought “their” candidate had won the debate. Barely a third of Fine Gael’s own voters could muster even that feeble assertion of partisan enthusiasm. Barely a quarter of Fianna Fáil’s. Even their own supporters think these two are duds.
Then there’s this, from the aforementioned Kevin Cunningham, sizing up the possibility for a comeback for Humphreys or Gavin:
“There are indeed very few left-wing voters who are undecided at this point. If anything, the undecideds are quite conservative. Just over half of those who are undecided support parties typically to the right — independents, Independent Ireland, Aontú or the radical right.
What’s more, 65pc of those who are undecided believe Maria Steen should have been on the ballot — and four in 10 say they would have voted for her if she had been on the ballot. That contrasts sharply with just 14pc of decided voters.”
Kevin’s theory – or at least the thing he thinks might happen – is voters on the political right like me (and I am guessing a preponderance of my readers) will take a look at the Catherine Connolly car crash campaign over the next three and a bit weeks and decide to do the patriotic thing: To come off the fence in favour of Gavin or Humphreys in order, in plain language, to keep the commie out of the Aras.
That seems to be the thinking in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, as far as I can tell from limited conversations with people in both camps. We can expect a steady drumbeat of Connolly criticism and old controversies over the coming weeks – none of it aimed at Connolly voters, and all of it aimed at trying to scare the likes of me and some of you into getting off our arses and voting Fine Gael to save the nation.
But it is, I think, highly unlikely to work, for two reasons.
First, the very voters that FF and FG now need are the same people who their conduct in this election has angered the most: 40% of the undecideds are people who say they would or could have voted for Mrs. Steen. 65% of undecideds think she should have been on the ballot.
Second, as the debate question shows, nobody really likes Humphreys or Gavin.
And so the proposition being put to us is “get off your arses and vote for this person you don’t much like so to stop this other person you like less”. From the Barack Obama school of hopey changey politics it decidedly ain’t.
The other problem that FF and FG have is that Catherine Connolly might be a fruitcake’s idea of a fruitcake, but so is a good chunk of the electorate. The leftmost 20% of the population has no difficulty with her candidacy. To paraphrase another cult political figure, she could walk down O’Connell Street putting capitalists up against the wall and shooting them, and her support would not waver. These people will vote.
This will be a low turnout election – but it will not be a low turnout election on the left. Every Keffiyah-wearing student, every sandal-bedecked green, every unctuous lefty barrister, every poetry reading practitioner of herbal medicine, every blue-haired barista, every the-jews-own-america crank, and every Aran-sweatered RTE researcher will be out to vote for Connolly. Amongst left-wingers, there will be no turnout problem.
If there’s a 40% turnout on the day – and my podcast co-host Sarah Ryan thinks that is optimistic – then massive turn out from the 20% of the electorate that is avowedly left wing will be enough to put Connolly in the mid-forties on the first count. And then it will be over.
They richly deserve this, do Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. This writer, at least, is not minded to save them from the fate they have chosen for themselves. But perhaps many of you are. We’ll see.
And you know the worst thing? They’ll still be texting, next time there’s an election, patiently explaining politics to me and everyone else, like they are the masters of the universe.
Masters of the deludeverse, more like.