I’m writing this piece at around midday on Sunday, in part so I can have a clear run, this evening, at what is shaping up to be an enthralling final round of the US PGA championship at Valhalla, Kentucky. Irish hopes will rest on Shane Lowry, who moved into contention with a stunning round of 62 on Saturday, but who surely can’t repeat that feat two days in a row. Bookies at this point seem to favour three-time major winner Colin Morikawa, who sits a shot off the lead and has a great all-around game.
To many of you, that paragraph is probably irrelevant gobbledygook: Only a small percentage of you will care who ultimately won (by what will now be) last night, and – unless it was Shane Lowry – know who that was. The rest of you won’t have a notion.
I mention this because it’s a useful allegory to the opinion polls published over the weekend about the European Elections, both of which tell a basically similar story: Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and Sinn Fein look dead certain, per the polling, to win at least one seat in each of the three constituencies. If the polls are to be believed, then amongst the “anti establishment” candidates, only Ciaran Mullooly and Michael McNamara would be (slightly) favoured to be elected. Niall Boylan and Peadar Toibin would both likely miss out, as would just about everyone else running to the right of Fine Gael on immigration.
Polls at this stage of a campaign have something of the character of Shrodinger’s cat, which is said to be both dead and alive at once. They are informative, without being in any way predictive. If the elections turn out differently, then there will be a rush to declare that “the polls were wrong” – but at this stage a poll is not predictive. It is simply informative. Both useful and useless at the same time.
And the polls do not tell us anything surprising.
Driving through Galway city last week, where I had a meeting, I saw precisely one poster for Peadar Toibin and none at all for Ciaran Mullooly. There were no posters for Hermann Kelly of the Irish Freedom Party; John Waters; or indeed anybody at all running as one of the other six “nationalist” candidates. The only exception to this were some very poorly designed posters for a crowd called “The Irish People”, which didn’t seem to promote any candidates and were in any case very ineffective posters (Pro tip for poster designers: People drive past them in traffic. The less text the better).
By contrast Galway, like Limerick and Dublin and every small town in between, is festooned with posters for the big parties. There is a simple reason for this: Those parties have the money (in EU elections, usually provided by their EU parliament groups) to print and put up tens of thousands of posters. Usually the people who put them up are paid to do it. By contrast, one candidate running as an “alternative” in the EU elections has 1,000 posters in total. To drape across his entire EU constituency. Finding them must be like seeking a needle in a haystack.
At this stage in the election campaign, the polls are mainly telling us two things: First, they tell us about party loyalty. But second, they tell us about name recognition. Everybody in Ireland South, by this stage, knows that Sean Kelly is on the ballot paper for Fine Gael because his posters are everywhere. Does everybody know that Michael McNamara is running? Or who Eddie Punch is? I doubt it.
The picture will change over the coming weeks inevitably for a few reasons.
First, debates will happen: In the two non-Dublin constituencies these will have a bigger impact because they will happen, in large part, on the dozens of local radio stations that make up the constituency. People like Mullooly and Toibin will be on Highland Radio, Galway Bay FM, Northern Sound, and so on. Voters will get to hear them directly which will mitigate the poster penalty. Even Justin Barrett, of the National Party, got an outing on Shannonside FM with the highly influential Joe Finnegan last week – as will every other candidate.
Second, those candidates who were sensible and prioritised it will see their taxpayer-subsidised Litir Um Thoghcháin land in people’s letterboxes. Funny thing that – one of the first to go out in Ireland South was that of Derek Blighe, who coincidentally is the highest polling “radical” candidate in the country. Would he have hit 4% in the polls before his leaflet went through every door? He might say “yes”, but I’m not sure.
Third, people will actually start paying attention: This brings me back to the golf example I opened the article with. The way you’re not interested in golf is the way most voters feel about politics: You might vaguely have been aware, through the news, that there was a big golf tournament this weekend. You may have heard that some player got arrested. You might have heard that Rory McIlroy is getting divorced. You might know who won, or you might not.
This is exactly how a lot of people are experiencing the EU elections: As background noise.
Irish voters, infamously, do not tune into these things until very late in the day. In the 2007 general election, there was a massive swing to Fianna Fáil in the last week as people focused on the economy. The last time these EU elections were run, there was an enormous late swing to the Greens. The last Presidential election saw a massive late swing to Peter Casey, and the one before that a massive late collapse for Sean Gallagher.
A candidate on anything from about 3% of the vote and upwards at this stage of the campaign is very much in contention to garner a late swing in support to push them over the edge. To do that, though, they will need to make the running and set the agenda in the campaign – just as Peter Casey did in that Presidential Election, and Fianna Fail did in 2007.
Winning these elections is a matter of timing: At some point, voters are going to tune in to make up their minds. The question is this: When they do: What candidates will be dominating the conversation and setting the agenda? Those that are will reap the benefits, no matter what the polls say today.