How Rishi can win over the millions of voters who are fed up with the Tories but won’t back Labour

IF you want to know who will determine what happens to Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives at the election, then look no further than the 2019 Tory voters — all those millions of people who took a punt on Boris Johnson.

Hoping to “Get Brexit Done”, lower immigration, and “level up” the left-behind regions, it was this unique and large coalition of often working-class, older, northern, and patriotic voters — many of whom went straight to work rather than university — who not only propelled Boris Johnson over the line but handed his party a commanding 80-seat majority.

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Rishi Sunak must win over those millions of people who took a punt on Boris Johnson in 2019[/caption]

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The Prime Minister has just unveiled the Conservatives’ election manifesto[/caption]

But now look at where these crunch 2019 voters are today.

Titanic disaster

According to the latest polls, as I said on The Sun’s election YouTube show Never Mind The Ballots yesterday, Rishi Sunak and his party are not even holding half of them.

In the latest polling by JL Partners, for example, only 43 per cent of 2019 Tories plan to vote Conservative next month.

The rest?

Well, while around one in eight of them (16 per cent) have switched to Labour, and another four per cent have jumped ship to join the Lib Dems, a larger share of them — some 22 per cent — have defected to Nigel Farage and the Reform party.

This is a major headache for Rishi Sunak.

And on top of all that, another 13 per cent say they don’t know who to vote for at the election.

So what does all this mean?

Two things. Firstly, and even more worryingly for Team Sunak, it means there is still space for Nigel Farage and Reform to grow.

With ten to 15 per cent of 2019 Tories saying they don’t know who to vote for it is entirely plausible that they too might switch to Reform.

The fringe party is already gathering a bit of steam now Farage has declared he will stand — its average share of the vote rose above 13 per cent this week, compared to 11 per cent at the start of the campaign.

There is currently zero evidence, in other words, that the Tories are doing what they urgently need to do by squeezing Reform’s vote down.

Which brings me to my second key point.

Unless Rishi Sunak and the Tories, in the final weeks of the campaign, can find some way of luring these 2019 Tories back they will remain firmly on course, as the polls suggest, for what will come to be remembered as the political equivalent of the Titanic disaster.

Unless Sunak can find a way of turning the ship by winning back half of the 2019 Tories who have gone walkies, then we really are about to witness what a Hollywood film might call an “extinction-level event” — the complete collapse of one of the most successful political parties in the entire history of democracy.

It would hand the Labour Party a super-majority which would allow them to do almost anything they liked.

This can include scrapping controls on illegal migration, maintaining mass legal immigration, embedding woke ideology in our schools and universities and giving votes to children.

Across all the latest polls, the Tories are averaging just 22 per cent of the national vote.

This either means they are on course for their lowest share of the vote at any general election in history or, alternatively, the polling industry is on course for the biggest error since it set up shop and might as well close down.

So how could Sunak win them back?

Well, while it certainly won’t be easy, I have polled these 2019 Tories and found they really care about two issues more than any others.

Stopping the small boats in the Channel, which are ushering in rising numbers of illegal migrants.

And lowering the overall levels of legal immigration, which have surged to record highs.

I have been telling Team Sunak for months now they should be making a big bold offer to these voters, such as a referendum on reducing legal immigration below 100,000 a year, or leaving the European Convention on Human Rights altogether.

This is so Britain can better control who is actually coming in and out of the country.

Prioritising Britain

In fairness, in recent weeks they have responded to this by promising to impose an annual cap on the number of immigration visas to reduce the number of foreign workers and their relatives coming to the UK.

They have also promised regular flights to Rwanda to remove illegal migrants from Britain, ending the use of hotels by asylum seekers, and prioritising Britain’s security interests over the country’s ECHR membership — though many Tory MPs and Reform politicians complain this is all still too soft, vague, and lacking detail.

Either way, at least Rishi Sunak is now making a direct pitch to all those 2019 Tories who look so utterly fed-up and frustrated with the direction of travel, who are wondering what happened to all those promises to slash immigration, control the borders and put the British people before anybody else.

Whether they listen to him and switch back to the Tories, however, remains to be seen.

Darren Fletcher

Never mind the Ballots with Harry Cole and guest Matt[/caption]