Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and this week, as we creep ever closer to a general election this year,

we're looking at how voters are feeling about politics, the parties and the future of the country,

because although political journalists like myself might be relishing the idea of the country going to the polls, that

is not a university-held belief as we're about to find out. To help, we partner with Thinks,

insight and strategy to bring you the results of their mood of the nation's survey, where they

poll 2,000 people for their views post-budget as we head towards the May elections, as well as from focus groups

with people across Britain who voted Conservative in 2019, but are now undecided to fill back them

again. We're going to play some clips from those groups and talk about what both the Tories and

Labour have to do to win over public, apathetic about politics, and pessimistic about the future,

following a pandemic, across living living crisis and some government chaos.

So joining me as my colleague, Adam Payne, was written about the results of the polling

exclusively politics home, as well as Ben Shimson, CEO of Thinks Insight.

I'm delighted to say we're also joined by Katzmith, Labour MP, former shadow minister for

young people in democracy, and current chair of the Commons Petitions Committee.

So Ben, just start with you then. Talk us through what the mood of the nation's survey is and

what the kind of the overarching themes that came out of the polling.

Sure. So the mood of the nation survey is a, I guess, an occasional series we've been running at Thinks,

Insight and Strategy since 2019, tracking voters optimism and pessimism for the UK, for their

local area and for their own lives. And we've done that at, I think, maybe six or seven

intervals since 2019. The most recent round before this one was last autumn, where we got the

most pessimistic results we've had since we started, including in the very depths of the

...