A total of 24 polls were published during April. Now, as our readers know, LDV doesn’t cover them with the same breathless excitements as other parts of the media. Most poll movements are within the margin of error, so it is only looked at over a period of time that you can detect whether there has really been any significant movements between the parties. With those caveats in place, let’s succomb to the inevitable and start poll-obsessing…
Here are the April averages for the parties across the six polling companies which conducted surveys:
- Con 31%, Lab 42%, Lib Dem 11% (Angus Reid, 1 poll)
- Con 35%, Lab 39%, Lib Dem 10% (ComRes, 1)
- Con 35%, Lab 37%, Lib Dem 15% (ICM, 1)
- Con 40%, Lab 40%, Lib Dem 9% (Ipsos-MORI/Reuters, 1)
- Con 36%, Lab 40%, Lib Dem 11% (Populus, 1)
- Con 36%, Lab 42%, Lib Dem 9% (YouGov, 19 polls)
All of which produces an average rating for the parties in April (compared with March) as follows:
-
Conservatives 36% (n/c), Labour 40% (n/c), Lib Dems 11% (n/c)
Let’s take a look at the figures from each of the main parties’ perspectives…
Conservatives…
It continues to be the case that the Tories have most to be cheered by looking at the current polls. Though the economy is growing only sluggishly, and the party is embarking on drastic cuts in public spending, they remain within touching distance of the Labour party. Compared to the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher trailed the Labour party in the polls between elections by substantial margins, David Cameron is faring well (though opinion polling has also become more sophisticated).
And yet it is also the case that the Tories, at least on current polling figures, would not win an election if it were held tomorrow. That’s fine for now… there isn’t going to be a general election tomorrow. But Conservative supporters are going to become more agitated if the polls continue to show their party in a near dead heat situation with Labour. Parties rarely become more popular the longer they are in government, so if the Tories’ aim is to govern alone they will be needing to break that 40% ceiling. Their ability to achieve that will depend on the economy.
Labour…
Ed Miliband’s party continues to benefit from its status as the sole mainstream opposition to the Coalition, hovering either a little above or below the 40% mark according to pollster. If, as expected, Labour performs strongly in the English local elections on Thursday night, Mr Miliband’s position will be bolstered, and there may be a post-5th May bounce. As John Curtice observes in The Independent:
Labour will certainly crow, if as expected, it gains control of Sheffield where Nick Clegg is an MP. But this and other possible gains in the North, such as Bolton, Oldham and perhaps even Leeds, will make less impressive headlines than gains further south, and especially gains made at the expense of the Tories. However, the party is so weak in much of the South that such prospects look rather thin. But if outside chances of gains in Tory-controlled Gravesham and Thanet were realised, the party would reckon to have given David Cameron a bloody nose.
And of course the fillip of those gains in England may be offset by the potential failure of Labour in Scotland to curtail the cult of the SNP’s Alex Salmond.
Liberal Democrats…
Well, on the bright side, the party’s ratings have yet to plummet to the 5% famously envisaged by one of our cabinet ministers last summer when the Coalition was enjoying still its honeymoon. But the Lib Dems are only just in double figures (and not even quite there if YouGov is your polling Bible) — nor have we enjoyed what used to be a grand April tradition: a small, short boost to Lib Dem poll ratings as vast tracts of the country are festooned with Focus leaflets.
Not this year: our role as junior partner in the Government means not only do we now ‘enjoy’ year-round publicity, but we now kop the flak rather than being seen as the nice-and-safe repositories of none-of-the-above voters. It also means we’re contesting fewer seats than in the past, and therefore our message isn’t reaching as many voters.
What will this mean for this Thursday’s elections? Well, the party looks to be in for a bloody nose in Scotland and Wales (though the proportional voting systems may protect the party somewhat from total wipeout), and quite possibly in the north of England, too. The one thing which may help the party’s narative is the media’s obsession with the ‘expectations’ game.
The party is predicted by Rallings’ and Thrasher’s latest local government projections, based on their model using local by-election data, to gain 17% of the national vote on 5th May; well above our national poll ratings, but well below where we were in 2007 (24%), when these seats were last contested. If so, we will lose some 400 of the 1,800 council seats we are defending: a hefty blow for a party which lives and breathes localism.
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13 Comments
As far as our support goes, either Rallings & Thrasher/ICM are wrong or all the other Polls are.
I still think our projected vote share will be in the range of 18-22%.
Whatever happens we have to remember that this Thursday will probably represent the low point of our fortunes inthis Parliament.
i think support will fall further – the cuts have yet to bite.
There is an unknown in all this. How far was the Lib Dem vote ‘real’ and how much of it was mostly motivated out of ‘protest,’ prior to the formation of the Coalition. Put another way – how many conviction voters do the Lib Dems have? Ugly truth is that the protest vote has likely gone for a generation now.
Indeed, whisper it very quietly, but might the Lib Dems have gained from FPTP giving voters a comfort blanket vote?
Worst case scenario is probably something like Barnsley. Best case scenario is probably something like Oldham. But if the tories do decide to go all out in their heartland then there could be a real problem.
That being said, 10% polling is not a huge problem at this stage of a parliament. But it can’t go on forever, not least because the tories might start to look to a snap election.
Once the fixed terms parliament bill is in force, they can only do that by making a deal with Labour. The last thing the Tories need, going into an election, is for everybody to think they’re the same as Labour.
But where did it go?
Worth noting that there have been quite a lot of local elections during this Parliament already, and so far the outcome has been basically: no overall change to anybody. Hardly conclusive, but it suggests the protest vote is more heat than light.
@Duncan
“There is an unknown in all this. How far was the Lib Dem vote ‘real’ and how much of it was mostly motivated out of ‘protest,’ prior to the formation of the Coalition. Put another way – how many conviction voters do the Lib Dems have? Ugly truth is that the protest vote has likely gone for a generation now.
Indeed, whisper it very quietly, but might the Lib Dems have gained from FPTP giving voters a comfort blanket vote?”
Ahh yes this old chesnut.
I assume by ‘protest vote’ you mean centre-left vote? I’ve heard that too many times to count
I think i will vote lib dem at the next general election, partly because after a lot of analysis I have decided that whilst the party’s leadership are terrible, the lib dems represent the only truly liberal perspective in great Britain and I find the membership (generally) more impressive than the other two parties.
But voters like me will be put off if this kind of silly denialism continues. I do not think Clegg was wrong in principle in joining with the Conservatives, I think he was wrong to campaign on a centre-left platform and then join with the Conservatives. I think, even after a lot of the shameless behaviour of the campaign, the coalition might have still worked if he had actually worked out a coherent and forward-thinking stratergy. Most intelligent analysts could have predicted (di predict) all the problems he has now easily in May.
But amongst the right of the lib dem party there seems like there is currently a campaign to blame the voters for their parties poor showing. Your post is an example of this. Over half the voters for the lib dems apparently abandoned the party because they were teenagers too thick to appreciate the wonderful politics of Clegg, not because they were centre-left voters who were won over and felt disgusted and betrayed after the lib dems campaigned on an honesty platform of ‘no more broken promises’.
Whatever your politics there is no denying that Clegg has been incompetent at every step of this fiasco, from a PR standpoint as well as a moral one. Whether or not you care to admit it the voters that have been lost were lost because of the bad decisions of the party membership which went against the grain of most of the voters for the party, especially the older social democrats as opposed to the newer libertarians. You haven’t just lost disinterested students, you’ve lost many of the most motivated and long-standing campaigners for your party. Many whom will still vote lib dem will unlikely to be motivated to campaign and have politics they never supported thrown back in their face.
Nick Clegg will not be leader of this party by the time of the next election. If he is then I for one won’t be voting for the party, despite my sympathy for it, and I fully expect the lib dems will be pretty much destroyed. I suspect the movement for a change leader will start coming fairly soon, with some cheeky opportunism from Huhne I think it may have begun.
WHo do the lib dems really think they can appeal to if they can’t appeal to centre-left liberal voters or centrist voters?
There is a reason that most liberals identify with the centre left (or at least more than with the centre-right), or prefer (in pricinple) Labour to the Conservatives , and it is that the centre of politics has been pushed to the right and left many old time centrists before. The kind of policies advocated by the old liberal party and the SDP, centrist parties in their time, were to the left of most of what was supported by Labour in the last ten years.
The point is that the lib dems want to get votes. What do right-wing liberals see as the future of the party? A party which can only ever get elected in the rare event of a coalition, in which it will always join with the Conservatives, adn suffer an ever dwindling base (consider that nearly half of the remaining members identify with the centre-left… just think about what the percentage would have been before the last election of the voters).
The Conservatives have already got market liberalism covered. There is no need and no demand for a party like the FDP in Germany, people who want more market liberalism will mainly be content to vote Conservative and have their vote count for something. On the other hand, there is certainly a demand for a centre-left party that respects civil liberties, as was clearly shown by the polls at the last election.
Do you just want to dismiss centre-left voters, and claim that the voter base are simply too stupid to understand the party? To treat trying to pursue and hold onto new voters, especially those of a left-wing persuasion, as probably horrifying? What future do you see for this party if it is not one of social liberalism is what I want to know, because I doubt most people in it, even now, would stick around if it was clear that the only dream the leadership can muster is that of becomming the despised rump of the Tory party.
There’s a new ComRes poll out:
Con: 34%, Lab: 37%, LD: 15%
This is our “highest ComRes share since last October”
http://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2011/05/03/labours-poor-polling-night-continues/
Jesus, you’re in for a shock on Friday morning. If this is what the centre is really thinking we’re more f**ked than I thought. I’m hoping the losses will be around the 700 mark and not the 1000.
Rob,
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, join the party.
You are a liberal and quite clearly willing to look past media BS about parties.
@Adam Corlett You neglected to mention that poll said Yes 34% No 66%. A stunning victory for Clegg’s strategy.
…recon John Doran’s spot on…and I recon you are in for a bit of a shock come Friday…
…can’t speak for others but you won’t be gettin my vote again..
Rob – “(consider that nearly half of the remaining members identify with the centre-left)”
Evidence?
Tell me, then, where is the party that believes in Market Liberalism, internationalism, civil liberties, the dispersal of monopoly powers, freedom of the individual, equality of opportunity and a safety net for the most vulnerable? Because if its not our party, there isn’t one.
“Tell me, then, where is the party that believes in Market Liberalism, internationalism, civil liberties, the dispersal of monopoly powers, freedom of the individual, equality of opportunity and a safety net for the most vulnerable? Because if its not our party, there isn’t one.”
My evidence is the polls Steven Tall put on the site recently, and I would say that the Conservative party roadly supports the things you list above.
There is a large section of the Conservative party, that might be said to include Cameron and Ken Clarke, that essentially classically liberal along those lines. There is little social Conservatism left with the Conservative party.
I’m not saying you’re wrong to want these things, but I’m saying that even if the Conservatives in general aren’t ‘quite’ classical liberals, they still have most of that base covered. The only economic liberals that will support lib dems are either those in Lib-Lab marginal constituencies or those who are self-conciously liberal (I mean, that they’ve read up about liberalism and are usually much better educated about political philosophy than the general population at large, or people who are liberal in their views but just don’t know much about liberalism).
Essentially that would turn this party into something like the socialist workers party, although far less extreme of course. I mean that if you were to try and make this a purely market liberal party along the lines of other such failed parties in Germany and Northern Ireland, then the only voters you could realistically attract from the right are the small number of self-conciously ideologically liberal types… since the Conservatives currently have most of the bases covered.
Again, I’m not saying that it is a good thing that people don’t always vote for the party closer to their actual philosophical beliefs, just that you will have a near impossible time taking votes from people who would normally Conservative,.