Pollsters suggested Labour must get 300 to 500 seats. Labour promised to get 150 seats. Labour got 300 to 500 seats. Suddenly the same polling says Labour must get 490 seats. Link two says the Tories briefed that they must get 500 seats. Could the figure of 490 be an effort to avoid quoting No.10?
Either way, the fascinating thing about the local elections was how everyone knew UKIP had won, and it was an earthquake, and it was a crisis for doomed Ed, long before any results were in. Everyone used the word “earthquake”. In the event, much of the earthquake was down to the chance that some Essex councils counted faster than some (much bigger) London ones. But news is news. ‘Kippers have the news nature. Therefore they are news.
We will now see something similar happening as the European Union finds some way in which Jean-Claude Juncker has to come out of this particular event with a new official car.
So what exactly is happening in this graph, then? The fanatical Tory bias of, erm… the polling companies and the people they talk to? Or, just possibly, is political reality a little different to what you – and I- would like it to be right now? We’re not looking at a Labour majority in the Commons in eleven months’ time.
If Ed M makes it into Number 10, he will do so as leader of a Labour-Lib Dem coalition, and even that doesn’t seem too likely. Not according to the pollsters, and not, it has to be said, according to the behaviour of almost all of the Shadow Cabinet, who are the most lackadaisical set of Opposition spokesmen I can remember bar the Tories in Blair’s first two terms.
FWIW, I am still saying what I said six month’s ago over at B&t: Tories to be biggest party in the next Parliament. But I’m not predicting a Tory overall majority (just possible but unlikely). Nor is it definite we’ll have another Tory-Lib Dem coalition- after the way the Lib Dems have been screwed over the last four years, they would have to be both mad and stupid to want another go-round (ie, based on what we know of the Lib Dems, there may be another coalition- but I wouldn’t bet the house on it). I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if we saw a minority Tory government based on the Lib Dems voting for ‘confidence and supply’.
You’ve got to admit that +300 is a win. which is my point.
The latest polling results on that site still translate into an outright win for Labour by 28 seats, though. If you’re arguing that the current trend (Labour slowly declining and Con holding roughly steady) will continue for the next eleven months and give the Conservatives a victory, then that’s true, but a different and less certain argument.
It’s a Labour win, but a small one, with the General Election scheduled for 7 May 2015. Which is why it’s not good news for anyone hoping for a Labour government.
And you must admit that to become the first Opposition since 1984 to fail to win the UK’s Euro-elections is…not a win. But you’re not admitting it.
Fair point by ajay. My arguments are (and have been since November) that:
a) the poll trends are going the Tories’ way;
b) the current Lab-Tory lead depends on all those currently declaring an intention to vote UKIP making good on that in the General Election, which I don’t think will happen. All the polling data say that the biggest single component of UKIP’s support is disgruntled Tories. I think we’ll hear a lot of ‘Vote UKIP, get Labour’, which will be an effective line for a lot of middle-class voters (not so much for working-class ex-Tory voters in, say, Kent and Essex).
c) party funding and organisation counts if you are fighting a tight election (which this one undoubtedly will be) and the Labour party is pretty strapped for cash right now.
d) the economy will almost certainly keep on recovering (for, I agree, weak values of ‘recovering’) until polling day, and this will bolster the Tory vote.
e) I did argue, over at Jamie’s in November, that the Lib Dems will recover some vote share in May 2015 and that some of their MPs will survive where a uniform national swing model would predict they will be defeated. (The latter is because I think many of the votes they lose will be in their inefficient, widely-distributed nationwide protest vote demographic, rather than for local voters staying loyal to a particular Lib Dem MP.) I’m rather less sure about the first of these than I was, since the Lib Dems have started massacring each other post-Euro-elections.
f) It’s just too much to expect the Labour party to go from its third biggest defeat since it became the official Opposition in 1918, straight to majority Government, in one election. I could see that happening if there’d been an economic or military disaster, but there hasn’t been. Lots of lousy government, yes, but an awful lot of voters will be remembering what happened to the economy in 2008.
If I end up being wrong, I think it will be mainly because of point b): all or most of those currently saying they’ll vote UKIP will actually do so.
The Lib Dem strongholds look a lot less formidable than they did before the local elections. Even the South-West was horrible. I think that is actually one of the most important results from the election.
I’d now add:
g) there’s at least some chance that the ‘shy Tory’ is back- ie the repeated under-estimation of the eventual Tory vote (and, usually, over-estimation of the Labour vote) by the polling companies. The 2010 General Election was the first in a very long time that the polling companies avoided this: their predictions of the Tory vote turned out pretty accurate. But in the Euro-elections, they under-estimated the Tory vote by an average of 2.6%. If that repeats itself in the General Election, it’s trouble for Labour. The current Labour vs. Tory lead, as a simple mean of the last ten polls, is 3.6%, and the trend is all towards the Tories.
h) Ed Miliband has awful personal poll ratings right now. I agree with those who say that he’d probably hugely out-perform expectations in a TV debate against Cameron and Clegg, since most accounts by people who have worked with him (eg Damien McBride) stress how likeable, witty and articulate he is in person. But for that reason, I can’t see Cameron agreeing to a debate. It’s harsh on Miliband- I think if Labour loses, the party as a whole deserves far more blame than he does- but there you go.
The latest Ashcroft poll of marginals shows a *huge* Labour lead: http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Con-Lab-Battleground-May-2014.pdf
All caveats regarding responding to one data point very much in place. Hilarious to know that 56% of the public say they will never vote Lib Dem though.
Anthony Wells has a good post here: http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/7687
I especially like the point that if you try to predict the result based on some sort of historical fudge factor, the harder you try, the bigger the confidence intervals get.
The odd thing for me about the Lib Dem results in my locality was that they were generally a complete disaster for them, finishing below the Greens in most wards, yet their incumbent councillors held their seats fairly comfortably. Is this just a freak?
I think about ‘news nature’ is a central one ,which i know you keep restating. for those of us that follow the polls we notice the inconsistency in attention that Lab on 33% gets compared to Lab on 37%. Its a good point about Lab doing better than the media narrative suggested.
Just as 2005 election results pointed to a hung parliament and erosion of the LAB/CON vote (people forget that Cameron was a two term project it was the crash that put the tories in range for a majority) the 2010 results pointed to a LAB/LIB coalition – for all the excitement and froth we are still broadly on track for that.
sorry , should read – your point about ‘news nature’ is a central one
‘The latest Ashcroft poll of marginals shows a *huge* Labour lead.’
Sorry, but anyone drawing comfort from that poll is really deluding themselves. The ‘latest’ Ashcroft polls were *published* recently, but most of the research for them was carried out several months ago. So if the more-recently-conducted polls suggest a steady decline in Labour support, as they do, they are the ones to trust.
Again I ask: what is happening in this chart?
Anthony Wells gives the end date for the latest Ashcroft as 01/06/14, which is an odd definition of “several months ago” apparently.
http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ANP-140602-Full-tables.pdf
that’s the latest national poll as opposed to the marginals poll isn’t it? He does two series – the national tracker and the “battleground”. Although the 9% Labour lead in this one will also go into the averages, along with a couple of YouGov polls with substantially higher Labour leads than we were seeing a couple of weeks ago.
Ashcroft polls fieldwork was 31 March to 18 May per the tables, so more or less the same period as the decline in the daily polls as far as I can see.
I don’t really take much store from the marginal polls though – by their nature, marginal constituencies are going to see better results for Labour than a national average. WIth respect to Dan’s points I’d say:
a) is true, although 1) it appears to have flattened out in the last few polls and 2) I would be careful in finding a trend in the data as opposed to the normal final year narrowing of the gap.
b) “Vote UKIP, get Labour” works well if what you want to do is pile up even bigger majorities in places like Sevenoaks, but it’s a very FPTP-inefficient slogan. And in general, tactical voting appeals don’t work all that well in UK generals.
c) Labour success in London was purely a ground game, and note that Labour didn’t play its “joker” (ie, the urban ethnic patronage networks, to put it politely) in the local elections. UKIP have siphoned off a lot of organising and activist capability as well as voters. Agree on the cash.
d) Agree, although the dependence on house prices means that this could get a bit exciting.
e) Tend to agree with Alex that the very bad experience of LDs in the Southwest is a bad sign for them here. I said this on Twitter on the night – the big message from the local elections might be that something like half a dozen true-yellow seats could be in play.
f) “Third biggest defeat” is kind of rhetorical here; I might equally say that it’s easier to overturn a majority of minus 20 than one of plus twenty.
g) is a very good point and it’s also surprising that the biggest errors were in the polls which have the biggest adjustments that are meant to take care of this, as far as I can tell from Anthony Wells’ site. It might be related to h), which although I can never bring myself to care about personal ratings, is obviously a negative.
I am still happy with my own forecast of equal vote shares and LAB as clear biggest party in a hung Parliament, but nobody should be making final calls until six months out at the earliest.
Yes, I feel quite safe in describing polls taken between 31 March and 18 May as being largely conducted ‘months ago’.
I think all three of us agree on point e): I did think in November, and more recently, that the Lib Dems were heading for less of a massacre than the polls indicated, but now I think it’s likely to be pretty brutal for them. Which means the next question is- who benefits most from a Lib Dem wipeout, Labour or the Tories? Probably to have an informed opinion on this one should look at the Lib Dem-held seats, in ascending order of how marginal they are, and have a look at who came second in that seat in 2010. Even then, there will have been redistribution of various wards since 2010, so it’s not necessarily an easy one to call.
On a), dsquared correctly notes that there is a ‘normal final year narrowing of the gap’ between the Government and Opposition. Which, sorry to say, is more bad news for Labour. In the last ten polls, the mean Labour lead is 4.1%. How much of that will be left after another eleven months of ‘normal narrowing’?
Going by the principle of ‘describe what you see in front of you, even if it doesn’t agree with your argument’, there does seem to be a slight but definite increase in the Labour lead since the Euro-elections, down largely to a Tory-to-UKIP shift.
If that sticks until election day, then yes, Cameron is out of Downing Street. If he can use some kind of ‘Vote UKIP, get Labour’ idea to cream off, say, a quarter of the current UKIP supporters, then he may be staying
Probably to have an informed opinion on this one should look at the Lib Dem-held seats, in ascending order of how marginal they are, and have a look at who came second in that seat in 2010.
I don’t think that’s necessarily going to help as much as one would think as there is a lot of tactical voting, particularly in the Southwest.
Speaking from the South West, albeit in an almost entirely ad hominem way, I’d agree. There were a lot of Tory seats where the Lib Dems had a strong presence and it didn’t take much Blairism to swing a lot of the Labour vote to them. The coalition has tossed all of that up in the air. Some good constituency MPs may survive, but others could be in deep doo-doo.
If he can use some kind of ‘Vote UKIP, get Labour’ idea to cream off, say, a quarter of the current UKIP supporters, then he may be staying
He needs more like a half because current UKIP support is very inefficiently distributed for him. Per the Anthony Wells average, four points would put CON and LAB neck and neck, which is, per Baxter UNS, three seats short of a Labour majority (or in other words, a LAB/NAT coalition)
And playing around, here’s a surprisingly plausible and attractively chaotic scenario which has a touch of la Belgique to it:
If we assume CON picks up four points from UKIP and Labour 1 point, then assume a 1.5 point final year swing LAB to CON, we end up with CON 36.5 LAB 34.5 LD 8 UKIP 12. Which gives the hung parliament from hell. LAB as biggest party, by a hair, but no two-party coalition able to form a government. In that situation, Cameron will make the argument that unrepresented UKIP voters mean are really Tories, so he has the mandate. But this won’t make many friends in the LDs, given what he did to them in the AV referendum, and so the concept of “the broadly progressive majority” will be rediscovered. I would guess that the eventual consequence would be a second election (in which you’d have to expect Kippers to come back to the fold and therefore potentially quite a big CON win), but it would be exciting to watch from the sidelines.
‘a LAB/NAT coalition’-
Oh, come on: a Labour-Nationalist government? That is the last coalition that we will ever see in British politics. They hate each other like poison: no Scottish Labour MP is ever going to consent to that deal. I could just about imagine, in a time of real economic or military crisis, Tories and Labour coming together in a National government, on the lines of Churchill’s wartime premiership, but never the SNP and Labour.
Me: ‘If he (Cameron) can use some kind of ‘Vote UKIP, get Labour’ idea to cream off, say, a quarter of the current UKIP supporters, then he may be staying (in Downing Street).’
Dsquared: ‘He needs more like a half because current UKIP support is very inefficiently distributed for him.’
Fair point. What I should have said was ‘If he can use some kind of ‘Vote UKIP, get Labour’ idea to cream off, say, a quarter of the current UKIP supporters- and if Labour lose three or four points off their current lead due to ‘shy Tories’, economic recovery or final-year narrowing- then he may be staying.’
Dsquared: ‘no two-party coalition able to form a government.’
I’ve been saying for a few months now that this is one likely outcome, increasingly the most likely. More and more, I think we’re very likely to see a minority government with the Lib Dems voting ‘confidence and supply’.
In that case, the Lib Dems will promptly withdraw that support as soon as there’s an economic downturn (probably a major correction to house prices, though dsquared can say better than I can whether there might be another banking crisis), and/or they think they have a chance of winning some seats back.
No way – to get that situation you have to get the numbers bang on. It’s far more likely that there will be either a CON majority or a LAB majority – think of the outcomes as a bell curve, and you’re comparing the height at one point with the sum of all the heights in one of the tails. If you toss a coin 100 times, 50-50 may be the most probable single result, but you’re far more likely to get a majority of heads or a majority of tails.
This is interesting on the “what do polls tell us this far out” point:
http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/homepage.html
On possible alliances: In 2010, there were 29 MPs elected from outside the three main parties. Of those, 1 was the Speaker; 1 was Green, Caroline Lucas; 3 were Plaid Cymru; 6 were from the SNP . 18 were from the Northern Irish parties: 5 Sinn Fein; 1 Lady Hermon, who is pro-Union but, improbably for a widow of the Chief Constable of the RUC, describes herself as a social democrat and left the Ulster Unionists after they allied with the mainland Tory party; 8 DUP; 3 SDLP; 1 Alliance.
Of those, Labour might ally with Caroline Lucas, Sylvia Hermon, the 3 SDLP MPs, and possibly the Alliance MP, Naomi Long. I would have thought a Plaid-Labour alliance was impossible but dsquared will be able to tell me if I’m wrong.
The Tories can’t really ally with anyone outside the Lib Dems, since the DUP have a long and largely hostile history with the Conservative Party. (And anyway the Tories have now formally allied themselves to the Ulster Unionists, the DUP’s foes, a move which promptly cost the UUP their one remaining MP as Sylvia Hermon announced that she wasn’t having anything to do with that Tory shower.)
I follow Scottish politics very much as an outsider, but even though the SNP seem likely to lose the referendum, they are apparently quite confident of picking up more Westminster seats in 2015. They’re targeting Falkirk, which has seen at least two very juicy Labour scandals, and the Lib Dem seats, including Danny Alexander’s. I wouldn’t have thought that ‘I worked hand in glove with the English Tory Chancellor to cut public spending’ was a terribly popular line with Scottish voters, so quite possibly it’s good-bye Danny.
I would have thought a Plaid-Labour alliance was impossible but dsquared will be able to tell me if I’m wrong.
I would say a certainty that Plaid would join Labour and they wouldn’t even ask that much in return. They actually were in coalition in the Assembly until 2011.
IIRC Plaid actually came to an agreement with Labour in 2010.
I don’t have Andrew Adonis’ book to hand but I seem to (possibly confabulatingly) remember that in all the Lab/LD negotiations, Plaid were basically assumed as a gimme and they guessed they’d be able to smooth out Scottish Labour’s very real hatred of the Nats.
I should have checked on the Plaid thing, obviously- that’s interesting to me, if not news to some other people.
So, vote share aside, and votes-to-seat ratio aside, Labour have more chance of forming an alliance than the Tories: they can shack up with the Lib Dems (perhaps), but also possibly with the likely 1 Green and 3 Plaid MPs, and perhaps with up to 6 of the Northern Irish MPs.
I’d still be amazed to see an SNP-Labour alliance, though. What do the SNP ask for that Labour can give them? The SNP’s whole raison d’etre is to defeat the Scottish pro-Union parties, of which Scottish Labour is by far the strongest.
On the SNP-Labour point, bear in mind that this will be happening after the referendum result, which will (either way) alter Scottish politics in ways that are very difficult to predict. (Charlie Stross called it the Scottish Political Singularity.)
Also, don’t think of it as “Labour and SNP hate each other (true) and therefore wouldn’t form an alliance”; think of it as “If the votes turn out right, the SNP will be in a position to decide whether the Labour Party or the Conservative Party is the lead party in the governing coalition in Westminster. Given that, how would it look to the Scots electorate if the SNP puts the Tories in?”
There aren’t that many Scots whose preference-ordering goes SNP-Conservative-Labour, I would think.
Sorry, up to 5 of the Northern Irish MPs. I still don’t think Labour’s position looks great, but they are currently ahead in votes-to-seat ratio, ahead in the polls and possibly up to 9 possible coalition seats ahead of the Tories.
I don’t think it’s right to say that the maths has to come out just right to deliver a confidence and supply government, though. There’s a range of electoral outcomes which might end up in ‘confidence and supply’, and the thing is we won’t know exactly what those are until and unless a) there’s been an election b) there have been attempts to form a coalition and c) we see whether or not enough minor parties are prepared to ally with Labour or the Tories to enable a coalition government. There might well be a smaller likelihood of a confidence and supply government than a coalition- quite possibly there is- but that’s a different argument.
The two main parties are quite closely matched.
There are five parties that could win English constituencies at the General Election. Their votes are distributed differently, so the party at present lying fifth (by number of votes – the LibDems) could have 20 – 30 seats while the two parties lying third and fourth may have zero or 1 or 2 seats. The LibDems appear to be positioning themselves as “kingmakers” but will that work if they continue to lie fifth by number of votes?
According to UKIP, some of their voters are people who have not voted for a number of years.
There are protest voters, who want to give the system a hard kick.
There are tactical voters, who vote to keep certain parties out, and who may change their vote at the last minute according to how the opinion polls show that their vote will affect the overall result.
The parties may seek to ally in various ways, with various strengths of alliance.
How good are the pollsters’ assumptions, rules of thumb or models at dealing with such a situation?
According to UKIP, some of their voters are people who have not voted for a number of years.
This is not good news for UKIP, as it probably means “some of the people who say they will vote for them in polls are in fact habitual non-voters”.
o hai, possible Labour-SNP alliance.http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/support-grows-for-snp-labour-pact-on-bedroom-tax-1-2891986
Yes, that’s a possible Holyrood coalition against one Tory policy. But a possible Westminster coalition involving the SNP supporting Labour? What might the SNP ask for, and what does Labour feel it can give?
Surely there has been one big change since 2010. The Holyrood system was set up with the expectation that no one party would gain an absolute majority, so that both Labour and the SNP would have to govern Scotland as part of a coalition. And up until 2012, that was how it worked. But in that year, the SNP made big gains against Labour in the West of Scotland and got an absolute majority, 65 out of 129 seats. Hence the referendum on independence. I can’t see any sign that Labour had ever expected this: the devolution policy was meant to push independence further away as far as Smith and Dewar were concerned, not bring it nearer. Scottish Labour now faces a much bigger threat from the SNP, surely, than it thought it did in 2010.
Yes, that’s a possible Holyrood coalition against one Tory policy. But a possible Westminster coalition involving the SNP supporting Labour?
If anything I would have thought that SNP and Labour are more likely to cooperate in Westminster (where both are on similar bits of the political spectrum) than in Holyrood (where one is the government and the other the lead opposition). Westminster has very little relevance in the Scottish political conversation now and the SNP only has, what, nine MPs there?
The biggest SNP demand is one that Labour can’t grant, because it’s the independence referendum, and by the time this is happening, the SNP has already had one, and lost it, and if they want another (which they won’t) then Labour can’t stop them because the SNP’s still in power in Holyrood.
What might the SNP ask for, and what does Labour feel it can give?
Remember that we’ll be the other side of the referendum, so the answer might be “continued relevance”.
Yes, I should probably have said I wasn’t asking that as a rhetorical question, but as a real one. What, concretely, do the SNP ask for? Cabinet seats? If so, how many? Will there be another referendum on independence if the SNP gets a second Holyrood majority? Who gets to be Secretary of State for Scotland? Do the two parties co-operate in Westminster and have an adversarial relationship in Holyrood, and how does that work out?
There might be workable answers to all of these questions- I’m just interested in what they could be.