I’m puzzled by some of the coverage in today’s News of the World / ICM poll of voters in Labour – Conservative marginals.
The Conservative share of the vote in that poll is 40%. At the last general election their share of the vote in those seats was 38% (assuming that the same seats have been polled as were polled in their marginals poll last autumn; that’s certainly how the newspaper’s report reads). That’s a gain of only 2%.
However, the last national ICM poll – in today’s Sunday Telegraph – has the Conservatives on 39%. That’s a gain of 6% on the general election.
In other words – the poll shows the Conservatives doing worse in the key marginal seats than they are doing across the country as a whole. The obvious conclusion? Lord Ashcroft’s much-vaunted key seats operation isn’t nearly as good as some Conservatives think (as indeed its results in 2005 demonstrated).
Curiously Nick Sparrow of ICM comments that, “Today’s results suggest the marginals situation is worse than is indicated by the national polls.” It’s not clear to me how this really stacks up. For example, if you look at swing rather than just Conservative share of the vote, the poll gives a 5% swing to the Conservatives in the marginals but there is a 7% swing in today’s national ICM poll. I’ve emailed Nick for his comments on this, but the comments thread is open to all…
UPDATE: Nick Sparrow has been in touch. It looks as if the News of the World was wrong when it said, “The last time we ran our rule over the 145 marginal seats six months ago…” (my emphasis) as actually the seats polled weren’t the same as were polled six months ago:
No they are not the same seats. When we are asked to do this type of poll we first look at the sort of swing suggested by the national polls. In this case we estimated the Conservatives on about 40% (+7%) and Labour on about 30% (-6%) to get an estimated national swing of 6.5%. So we chose all seats where Labour came first and the Tories second where a 10% swing would lead to a change in party MP, so as to include all seats that could possibly fall even with a larger than national swing of 6.5%. It is in these seats we found a 9% swing.
Vote share we got this time is as follows 40% Con, Lab = 32%, Libs = 16% and others = 12%.
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7 Comments
Given that the marginals will already have above average tory votes and in mant cases are held tory seats I understand its not surprising that the swing might be a few percent below the national average. The law of diminishing returns.
Its a really good poll for the tories and I’m not sure an entire post trying to dismiss Lord Ashcrofts millions on the basis of a 2% gap does much for the sites credibility really.
Two better topics would
1. If this poll has been in Con /LD marginals what would it have shown? Though you may have wanted to do that in a private forum.
2. Do LD/Labour marginals show the same type of anti government swings ?
David: the implication of your comment is that for any particular average swing across the country as a whole, you’d expect to see that the higher a party’s share of the vote is in an individual seat, the lower the swing is (‘law of diminishing returns’ as you put it).
There is certainly a neat logic to that proposition. However, the evidence from general election results is that this isn’t how things actually work. The pattern of swings doesn’t fit this proportional pattern.
That’s why uniform swing projections have a better track-record than projections which use this sort of proportinately varying swing (though both are pretty patchy when it comes to predicting the number of seats for the third party).
Yes agree with you Mark, it could show that the Tories are not pulling in more votes despite all the extra spend and are only gaining where they don’t need to in safe Tory seats based on national TV / Press coverage.
I find the demographics useful to understand – is Cameron appealing more to young / old or men / women or ABs or C D Es…
Given the latest upsurge is more about Labour doing badly than Tories doing well – would be interesting to know how the Lib Dem / Lab and Lib Dem / Tory marginals fare.
I would gues that it is in the marginals that the Tories will put in their resources in a general election. In these areas, they will be better at getting their vote out.
Same for everyone else of course.
Remember how well Lord Ashcroft’s millions were spent in North norfolk last time.
I would hope the marginal poll confirms that the Tories are doing better in Safe Tory areas (hence the small marginal swing & larger national swing).
I don’t think that the Conservatives will be criticising Ashcroft anytime soon….
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