It is rather fashionable at the moment for those involved in politics to moan about what a boring election campaign this is shaping up to be, and how the only excitement will be once polls close and the results start rolling in. But interestingly fewer voters than you might think agree with this view.
YouGov asked at the weekend ‘how interesting or boring have you found the general election campaign so far?’, and while a majority – 51 per cent – said it was boring, 42 per cent said it was interesting. The ‘interesting’ camp was made up of 33 per cent of voters who thought the campaign ‘fairly interesting’, while 9 per cent said it was ‘very interesting’. When asked how closely they’d been following the campaign, 57 per cent said either ‘very closely’ or ‘fairly closely’, with 41 per cent saying either ‘not very closely’ or ‘not at all’.
It will be interesting to see whether these numbers change if the question is repeated this weekend, given the Tories are hoping voters will start engaging seriously this week. Perhaps voters will grow more bored with what’s on offer the more they engage.
Incidentally, this particular poll includes some rather interesting findings on whether people who followed the TV debates or are religious are more or less likely to do household tasks. It seems religious people are slightly less likely to do things like changing a lightbulb, assembling flat pack furniture, repairing a dripping tap and so on (presumably hoping the hand of God might do it for them).
The picture is slightly more mixed when the answers are segmented according to the amount of attention those surveyed paid to the TV leader debate. Those who said they watched all of the programme were more likely to have painted a room, changed a fuse, changed a plug, wallpapered a room, repaired a dripping tap and tiled a room than those who only watched some, and than those who didn’t watch it (apart from on ‘wallpapering a room’, where those who watched all and those who watched none came equal on 15 per cent). But on changing a lightbulb and assembling flat pack furniture, those who watched all of the programme were less likely to have attempted these tasks than those who watched some. What this tells us about the boredom thresholds of the voting public, other than that watching paint dry is appealing to 46 per cent of those who also watched all of the TV debate, is anyone’s guess.
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