Santa votes Green, Scrooge votes Reform
4 min read
Who do you think Santa votes for? Chances are it's whichever is your preference. But once that bias is discounted, it turns out Father Christmas is all for Zack Polanski.
How does Santa vote? YouGov recently asked people to say how they thought Father Christmas would vote at the next general election. The most common answer, from those who identified a party, was Green. They also asked about Ebenezer Scrooge. According to the public, he’d vote Reform.
Some people claim that pollsters ask these sorts of questions to generate cheap headlines. What a cynical world we live in.
Even 23 per cent of Reform voters think Scrooge would be one of them
Questions like this can in fact tell you quite a lot, sometimes about issues, sometimes about voters. “You live in the land of Oz,” the US pollster John Zogby famously asked, “and the candidates are the Tin Man, who’s all brains and no heart, and the Scarecrow, who’s all heart and no brains. Who would you vote for?” Zogby claimed this allowed him to see what voters wanted, freed from their perceptions of individual candidates or parties. It’s also why focus groups are often asked to visualise the political parties as biscuits or cars or animals – because this can often get at something that more conventional questions might miss.
Dig into the data a bit and you learn quite a lot about voters. For one thing, while the Greens topped that Santa poll, they did it with 32 per cent – and you’ll notice that that is far from a majority. A more accurate way of summarising the poll, therefore, might be that most voters don’t think Father Christmas votes Green. Plus, it’s only 32 per cent after you have excluded the don’t knows and won’t votes. Yet those two groups made up more than half of all respondents; of the overall data, the plurality response was “would not vote” (30 per cent). (Perhaps because Santa’s travelling, and wouldn’t make it to the polling station? Surely he’d have a postal vote?) Of the raw data, just 14 per cent of respondents picked the Greens.
More importantly, if you look at the cross-breaks, it becomes clear how much of the aggregate score is being driven by people’s own partisan views. The top choice of Conservative supporters was that Santa would vote Conservative; the same, mutatis mutandis, was true for supporters of Labour, the Lib Dems, Reform and the Greens. It’s a classic case of in-group projection. Santa’s a nice chap, the argument goes, so he must be one of us.
Much the same applies to the Scrooge question. Reform was chosen by 43 per cent of those who identified a party – a minority and an even smaller minority (30 per cent) of the overall data – and again there was plenty of projection going on, although this time it’s out-group projection. He’s not a nice chap, the logic goes, so he must be one of them. Reform was the top choice of Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters; Reform voters, by contrast, were most likely to think Scrooge would vote Labour, as did Conservative voters.
You find this effect whenever you ask these sorts of questions, as with British TV characters a few years ago – Postman Pat was seen as pro-Brexit by leavers, anti-Brexit by remainers – or in a new research paper, just out in Political Science Research and Methods, which tested it with characters from Harry Potter, Marvel and Star Wars. They found out-group projection to be especially strong, with voters on the left engaging in it more.
Yet it’s not all projection, else the Greens wouldn’t top that Santa poll overall. The reason they do is both because Green supporters were even more sure Santa would be one of them (55 per cent of Greens think that) and because non-trivial chunks of supporters of other parties think the same. Some 24 per cent of Labour voters think Santa’s a Labour voter, but 20 per cent think him a Green; 22 per cent of Lib Dem voters think he’s one of theirs but 17 per cent think he’d be a Green. That must tell you something about the party’s image. The same applies to the fact that even 23 per cent of Reform voters think Scrooge would be one of them. That, too, must tell you something. Bah humbug.
Further reading: S Turnbull-Dugarte and M Wagner, Heroes and villains: motivated projection of political identities, Political Science Research and Methods (2025). YouGov polled 2,155 people, 23-24 November 2025, online, and the figures are weighted and representative of all GB adults aged 18+
