Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

In praise of the ‘Don’t know’ voter

It’s the last-minute swingers, not the ideological warriors, who make democracy function

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I am scraping the edges of my memory here, but I am fairly sure that opinion polls in my childhood (for the elections of 1970, 1974 and 1979) quoted four percentages: Conservative, Labour, Liberal and ‘Undecided’. Nowadays no figure is quoted for ‘Don’t knows’, and party support is contrived to add up to 100 per cent.

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Because you read about general election 2015

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