Chris Lightfoot’s graph is very instructive. I suspect actually there will be very little movement in the polls over the next year until G. Brown (for it will be he) is elected Leader of the Labour Party at the 2007 Party conference.

I don’t know - there is potential for all three parties to have interesting conferences one way or the other. Baring any “events” though I would be surprised if there was any significant change over the Summer.

[…] There are arguments about MORI’s methodology, but with the exception of ICM (which looks like an outlier), the other polls also show no burning need to panic, with our polling up flat or slightly up since Ming took over. Working on like vs. like comparisons and assuming that their bias is consistent over time, it suggests that there is no need to panic just yet. […]

A resurgent Liberal » Blog Archive » Latest polls…,

On the basis of 22% of the vote in the general election to averaging 18% today, the LibDems have lost 19% of there support at a time when the government has been dropping in popularity and has lost almost 10% of it’s support.

At just what point should panic set in.

Peter

As LibDems always put on 3-4% in a GE campaign there is no need for them to panic but every poll showing the Conservatives cannot be even the largest party at a time of great Labour government unpopularityshould be cause for panic in Cameron ranks .

Did the LDs ‘put on’ 3 to 4% in the last general election campaign?

Brian - it depends where you measure from.

At the start of the last election campaign, the Lib Dems were around 20-21%, so put on 2-3 points. If you go back a month or two before that - to February 2005 - the Lib Dems were down at 18%, presumably because Labour and the Conservatives were going at each other hammer on tongs in the “phony election campaign” while the Lib Dems, with less money to waste, were keeping their powder dry. From there they gained about 5 points!

If, on the other hand, you compare the Lib Dem election result with the sort of figure they were getting in the middle of the 2001-2005 Parliament, in 2003 and 2004 they were quite often getting 23% or above (a long way above at some points), so they didn’t have any election boost compared to that.

So yes, there does tend to be an increase in Lib Dem support during election campaigns, but it doesn’t follow that they will do better at the next election than their support at any given point mid-term.

Fair comment Anthony

Cheers for that Anthony.I can only ever recall the LDs being above 20% from the Brent East by election onwards,obviously I need a good poll archive for future reference.

Brian , Look to the column on the right and click on Historical Polls 2001-2005 and you will find all the info you need .

Cheers for that, didn’t realise the polls were so consistent during the 2005 election campaign. Have we seen the last of 1992 type surprises with modern polling techniques?

The continued consistency and accuracy of polls could be seen to be influencing elections. This can be seen both ways. Negatively it could alter peoples voting patterns, so that if one party has a big lead, voting patterns alter and it is harder to beat them as people don’t bother voting, although it could be argued that if the leading party’s supporters stay at home because “It’s in the bag”, the trailing party could swing a surprise.

A positive way to look at it is that if polls are accurately predicting the result months ahead, then the election is being thought not on the issues raised and the efforts of a short term campaig, but rather on a background of much broader long term deliberations.

I suspect it’s a combination of the two, and for better or worse we now live in an age where the accuracy of polls means a lot of the uncertainty is missing from elections.

Certainly if polls are now able to pretty accurately predict results more than a month out, calls for things like a ban on polling in the last week seem pretty pointless.

I’d be interested in any research or views on the influence of polls on actual results.

Peter.

I think the most important thing to remember is that the Conservatives are not going to win an overall majority unless they can get in the region of 10 percentage points ahead of Labour, thanks to the way in which their vote is so heavily concentrated in southern seats, such as Buckingham or Horsham, for example. This is still true after the new boundary changes, which make it easier for Labour to lose their majority, but not much easier for the Conservatives to win outright.

At the moment, that isn’t happening. A 5 per cent lead is only good enough for a hung parliament, so Cameron should be looking to do better than at present.

It may yet come down to who can get they’re vote out and that means it could be a lot closer than polls show.

Even though the polls only show a 5% lead, in an election campaign you could have a similar effect to the Blair landslide, where one party’s side is hungery for victory and motivated and the other has supporters that are tired and dissillusioned.

I think thats one of the reasons every Labour spokesperson is talking about “Renewal” whenever possible, they are desperate not top look “Tired”.

The problem is they’re current attempts seem to be misfiring partly because whether it be Reid at the Home Office or Blair with Education and Health, they are responsible for the policies they are now trying to change.

In the first term that could claim to be dealing with the mess the Tories made, now they seem to be campaigning for re-election on a platform of clearing up the mess they have made. A lot of Labour supporters are pinning there hopes on Brown changing things be he has signed up for everything Blair has done.

Having said that he has been very quiet over the Lebanon, and I haven’t heard him challenge or back Blair.

Peter.

My worry is not the polls or will anyone have a majority, will people bother turning up. I have a nasty feeling I’ll not vote at the next election, then again if the Tories come out against ID cards I might for the first time in my life vote for them. But right now I can see no reason to vote, Labour and the Tories are so close it is hurting just to listen to the rubbish. Now Blair comes out and says some of the Tory policies are right, Cameron has agreed with Blair. why not have one party and call it communism.

I can not disagree more with treborc, minimum wage, increase spending on health, more police, gay rights and many many more things on which the main parties differ (and the Tories voted against). I owe so much to the Labour party and this government that I could never see myself voting against them.

gary,

The Tories have accepted the minimum wage, and for more than 5 years pledged to match health spending.

They have always been in favour of more police and prisons, and on that issue Labour have moved towards them.

Add to that Labour have backed PFI, privatisation, renewing Trident, nuclear power, Council housing transfer,and tougher immigration controls.

Like it or not the two partys have triangulated more than ever, and if Labour is to get another term it will need something better than,

“Vote for us because, when we introduced the minimum wage more than a decade ago, the Tories were against it”

People will vote on what they are being offered for the future, not what was offered twelve years ago.

Peter.

Can two parties triangulate or should it be three?

Jack,

Good point in that although it’s called triangulation, what actually happens in the US and UK is that each of the two main party’s pitches from it’s core support towards the others.

In reality they don’t actually fight over the middle ground, they fight over the ground between them.

In a two party system with a party on the right and a party on the left, that coincides with the middle ground, but thats only because of the starting positions of the party’s.

In the Scottish elections, the SSP pitched for old Labour and SNP supporters and did well, particularly surprising the SNP.

The SNP got caught because while we we focusing on asperational middle Scotland to our right, the SSP came from the left and appealed to the left of the SNP.

If you like, “It bit us on the bum”. In a multi party PR system party’s may need to fight on more than one front, with opponents to right and left.

On a UK level Labour has no one major gunning for their traditional core support. The Tories on the other hand have had to deal with UKIP.

On a UK level the difference is of most importance to the LibDems because they are the ones who need to decide whether to “triangulate” and make it a three way fight over Middle England or “diverge” and try to go to the right or left of one of the others.

On civil Liberties I’d say they are to the left of Blair, and so in some respects they are offering an alternative, although cameron is looking like he might move that way, probably calculating that the bulk of tory voters might not like it, but won’t actually vote labour.

If it keeps up like this pitching in to the others territory could see us if three or four years time, with Cameron upsetting Tories by being kind to hoodies, while Brown annoys the Unions by cuts and freezes on the public sector.

Peter.

Anthony,

How useful is UNS at the moment? We saw yougov’s analysis of the local election reporting the Conservatives on 47% in the London TV region and only 30% in “the north”

If the votes are targeted, rather than moving uniformly, I appreciate that it makes any prediction an awful lot harder but are there any estimates on the state of the parties based on more regional predictions?

Peter Cairns,

You missed the whole point of my argument, yes the Tories have accepted some of Labours changes (changes which the Tories would never have made and changes that the Tories would never match in the future).

Yes the Tories have pledged to match labour on health spending, but if you read the small print you can see that it is no match at all, the Tories always agreed to match current spending but not future rises that Labour had built into the system.

So I say once again all parties are not the same, do not fall for the spin.

As useful as it ever is, that’s why I always link to my article from the swing calculator when I mention projections, just to remind people of the page full of caveats. If the Tory swing is concentrated in the South they will proably do better than on UNS, since there are more of their target seats there, it depends on the magnitude of hte swing though.

At the moment there are no robuast regional figures to base it on - the polls have been pretty stable lately, so it would be possible for one of the pollsters to do something based on the aggregate data from their last 4 or 5 polls, broken down by proper regions. Until then though…

Anthony , I did try and do some calculations on the effect of a lower swing in the North and a higher swing in the South and as far as I could measure it made little difference to the overall number of Conservative gains , the larger number of gains in the South almost equally balancing the lower number in the North but it was not a thorough analysis .

I haven’t explored it at length either - I think it really does boil down to the precise swings. Overall the Tories have more target seats in the South and London, so I suspect in *most* cases it would help them to have a greater swing in the South, but I’m sure on some magitudes of swing they would be better off it was concentrated in the North.

That said, I think it’s safe to say that almost any swing to the Tories in the North-East is wasted - IIRC there are no real target seats at all there.

Tynemouth is I think the only real target seat in the North East for the Conservatives . The new Sunderland Central seat is rather more favourable than most but not a realistic chance IMHO .

Tynemouth needs a swing of around 6.4% - the other possible is Middlesbrough S & Cleveland E, which requires about a 9.3% swing