How do Tory members rank the leadership candidates?

Members want Mordaunt, but can't decide between Badenoch and Truss.

The Conservative Party leadership is hotting up. Rishi Sunak is the favourite among MPs (for now), whilst Penny Mordaunt has an impressive lead among party members, according to YouGov.

Whilst polls like YouGov’s are interesting, they force respondents to choose a single candidate. This means we can’t really say much about where their support flows to when their candidate is eliminated.

So, I decided to run a little experiment myself. Just like on Family Fortunes, I asked 100 party members to rank the eight leadership contenders in order of preference.¹ Our survey said…

Basic Ranking

Firstly, what is striking about this sample of members is just how many support Mordaunt — 58% of the sample. Second place is Kemi Badenoch, and poor Jeremy Hunt fails to win over a single supporter.

Condorcet

The second method we can use is the Condorcet method, where we essentially place every candidate in a head-to-head battle with every other candidate.

Again, Mordaunt defeats every opponent (similar to YouGov’s findings). Here Truss has leapfrogged Badenoch for second place, and the MPs’ favourite, Sunak, only managed to defeat Hunt.

Single Transferrable Vote

In the real contest, MPs whittle the field down to just two candidates. We can use the ranking of each leader as STV-style ballots to see how preferences shift when candidates are eliminated, and if there are any clear blocs of support emerging.

The Sankey diagram² shows the flow of votes in each round, with the members’ last preference eliminated and their votes reallocated. We see that Mordaunt is a clear winner, but party members are very closely split between Badenoch and Truss as to who should join her in the final two.

In the election, the quota is 33.3 votes.

1. In the first round, Mordaunt wins 58 votes and so is through to the final round. Her 24.7 preferences are reallocated to:

   1. Truss ← 13.2

   2. Badenoch ← 5.1

   3. Braverman ← 3.4

   4. Tugendhat ← 1.3

   5. Sunak ← 0.9

   6. Zahawi ← 0.4

   7. Hunt ← 0.4

2. In the second round, no candidate has passed the threshold so Hunt is eliminated. His 0.4 preferences are reallocated to Tugendhat.

3. In the third round, no candidate has passed the threshold so Zahawi is eliminated. His 1.4 preferences are reallocated to:

   1. Sunak ← 1

   2. Badenoch ← 0.4

4. In the fourth round, no candidate has passed the threshold so Sunak is eliminated. His 3.9 preferences are reallocated to:

   1. Tugendhat ← 2

   2. Truss ← 1

   3. Badenoch ← 0.9

5. In the fifth round, no candidate has passed the threshold so Tugendhat is eliminated. His 9.7 preferences are reallocated to:

   1. Truss ← 6.9

   2. Badenoch ← 2.9³

6. In the sixth round, no candidate has passed the threshold so Braverman is eliminated. Her 11.4 preferences are reallocated to:

   1. Badenoch ← 9.1

   2. Truss ← 2.3

7. In the seventh round, Badenoch has reached the quota (31.356, vs 33.310 for Truss).

It seems clear that you have two broad clusters of support here (confirmed by cluster analysis, and presented in this graph). Cluster 1 is made up of 15% of the sample, and cluster 2 is made up of 85%.

There are two clusters of Conservative support among the members. Tugendhat, Zahawi, Sunak and Hunt draw relatively more support from cluster 1 - but this cluster is tiny in comparison to cluster 2. Truss, Badenoch and Braverman draw relatively more support from cluster 2. Mordaunt leads in both.

What is cluster 2 all about? Is it a libertarian cluster, perhaps? Or an “anti-woke” cluster? Is it just a coincidence that the clusters are split by gender? No info about gender was put into the cluster analysis, so it’s likely to be a coincidence.

This is just a bit of fun, with a small (and likely unrepresentative) sample. But it’s a test run to make the case for more of this type of analysis when it comes to looking at what the Conservative Party membership actually thinks.

There is so much we don’t know about the ideology of the Conservative Party membership. Given the fact that they will soon have chosen two prime ministers in the last three years, that seems a bit of an oversight.

1. Unlike Family Fortunes, I do not have £30,000 to play with. In fact, I have no funding to do this so it really is just a simple survey via certain Facebook groups. I make no claims of representativeness either. I had approached ConHome to include this in their member panel but they said no, sadly!

2. I tried so hard for so long to make one of these using ggplot2. It did not go well at all, so this is from Flourish, which has its own issues.

3. Rounding errors.