Signals and impressions matter

Back in the 2010 election, I lived in a Labour-Tory marginal (Poplar & Limehouse if you're curious). So we were subjected to dozens of 20ft high posters of David Cameron looking concerned and Gordon Brown looking smug and in every election since our house has been pelted with campaign leaflets and letters, mainly from the Conservative party.

Poplar & Limehouse is an interesting mix of inner city / docklands Labour and more affluent professionals who have moved in as part of the unstoppable growth of Canary Wharf and my partner and I fall somewhere in between.
We don't work in Canary Wharf but we are both educated, youngish professionals who work in white collar jobs on moderate incomes. We don't have any children or dependents, rent privately and occasionally indulge in the national pastime of getting mildly outraged by "benefit cheats". We'd like to own our own home in a few years time and so are diligently saving up for that first deposit.

The reason I'm telling you all of this dull and introspective background is because rational voter theory tells me I'm a perfect Tory target voter and yet I struggle to imagine myself voting for the party in 2015. At risk of making the classic pollster's mistake of assuming that everyone shares my views, I thought it might be useful to list some of the reasons why the Conservatives are having such trouble appealing to my exact demographic.

1. Immigration and other appeals to UKIP voters give the impression that for all the nice socially liberal things David Cameron does, like same sex marriage, he is beholden to people with much more right wing views. Theresa May said that the Tories were seen as the 'nasty party' and while the practical effects of anti-immigration rhetoric may be minimal (with due respect to this man), it all adds up to the impression of a party whose views are closer to the comments section under Daily Mail articles than people like me.
There's some interesting polling on attitudes to immigration split by generation with baby boomers and above being overwhelmingly hostile while generation X and Y are more mixed. In a meeting I had a few weeks ago someone mentioned that the EU and immigration are more emotive than rational subjects for voters and they were right: the immigration debate in the UK is nothing but emotion. Voters apparently believe that immigrants make up 31% of the population when the actual figure is 13%, similar to how they think that £24 out of every £100 spent on welfare is claimed fraudulently when the actual figure is closer to 70p. These are not subjects where rationality reigns.
For those of us who do not have apocalyptic views on the subject, David Cameron's endless attempts to woo UKIP voters by sounding tough on immigration are extremely off putting and a little offensive for those of us who have friends or relatives who have come here to work and live and "pay into the system". Even if we don't think Cameron himself is narrow minded enough to agree with the tabloids on immigration, the fact that he feels the need to keep banging on about it tell us that he has chosen which group to pander to and it's not us.

2. Housing. I'm moving house soon and so going from being screwed by the housing crisis in one way (lack of space) to being screwed by the housing crisis in another way (ludicrously high rents). There are so many good critiques of why we're in the hosing crisis that we're in. Most focus, rightly, on a chronic lack of supply when demand is only ever going up. The feeling though, particularly for someone renting in London, is that while this happened under Labour and Conservative governments, the Conservatives are less likely to have a problem with it because their supporters are more likely to benefit from high house prices. Even though Ed Miliband isn't exactly poor (and Tony Blair certainly isn't), when I look at David Cameron or George Osborne and especially Grant Shapps, all I can think of is that they have never had to worry about being able to afford the rent for that month or spent hours dreaming about when they would finally be able to buy their own home and leave the second tier of citizenship that comes with renting rather than owning.
Even "Help to Buy", though designed to specifically appeal to people in my situation, is hamstrung by the need to do this without lowering prices because that's the real priority. It comes across as far more of a political fix than something than can actually help me. In fact it's worse than not helping because thousands of people are going to take out huge mortgages for impossible-to-afford homes and fall into negative equity as soon as the Bank of England pushes interest rates up beyond zero. Help to Buy seems almost like a con designed to look like the government is addressing the housing crisis while doing as little as possible about the underlying causes.
Conservative voters are far more likely to be home owners than those who don't vote Conservative so the impression Help to Buy gives, fairly or unfairly, is that the Conservatives care far more about keeping these people wealthy by avoiding anything that might lower house prices than they do about helping young people become homeowners.
Ed Miliband says Labour will build a million new homes. He hasn't gone anywhere near proving that this is possible or realistic but at least it sounds like they care about our side of the problem.

3. Protecting the old but not the young. The thing that ties these two together is that both prioritise the interests of the pre-war and baby-boom generations to the absolute exclusion of those younger. 

As with housing, I can't really blame the Conservatives for picking the demographic most likely to vote for them but there are times when this feels needlessly vindictive such as when the Coalition plans to cut benefits for anybody under age 25. Young people have already suffered from the worst economy for new workers in 80 years, seen the cost of education treble and the cost of housing (both rents and high house prices) are effectively a net transfer from the young to the old. Meanwhile pensions and other benefits that benefit older people are untouched and take on sacred cow status for all parties but particularly for one whose supporters (and the voters they want to woo) are disproportionately over 55.

As I mentioned, we're not on benefits or under 25 but impressions and signals matter in politics. They give us an idea of how politicians will deal with issues that aren't being discussed right now and whose interests they will look out for when those issues crop up. 

The main impression I get from the Conservative party is that until I somehow own my own home and reach the age where power walking is a legitimate form of exercise, the interests they look out for won't be mine.