What the Tories don’t understand about Corbyn voters

Until recently, the Tories seemed pretty confident about next week’s election. Despite spending three and a half years blundering over Brexit, they were still comfortably ahead of Labour in the polls. In Jeremy Corbyn, they had an opposition leader denounced as a terrorist sympathiser, an unreconstructed communist, a rabid anti-Semite and — in general — an enemy of Britain. You might regard Corbyn this way yourself. If so, then it’s worth asking: if he really is so bad, why has support for Labour been steadily increasing since the election was called? Is the nation going mad — or might there be more to it?

I’ve supported and campaigned for Corbyn’s type of politics most of my adult life. Perhaps I’m far too embedded in the choir to be able to spot whether he is as off-tune as the headlines say — but if he ends up in No. 10 it would make perfect sense to me. Here’s why.

As our society gets ever more segmented and social-media algorithms keep us in political safe spaces, our ability to see what’s going on outside of our particular circles gets weaker. This election, more than any I can remember, is just too complicated to be easily predicted. Will Remain Tories decide that their concerns about Brexit trump their fear of Corbyn? Will Lib Dem supporters realise that pursuing their dream of Jo Swinson in No. 10 simply increases the chance of keeping Boris Johnson there? And what about those millions of late-registering young voters?

When I’ve been out canvassing this election I’ve spoken to hundreds of voters and have found the public mood nowhere near as anti-Corbyn as the newspapers claim.