I met up last night with Kunal Khatri, formerly of the YF Executive Committee, who readers will remember as the excellent organiser and host of our pub quizzes last year. Hard to escape, we discussed the election and the potential impact the outcome could have on our respective day jobs. Amongst other things, we talked a bit about the polls, which have improved in the last couple of weeks in a much more convincing way than the Labour boost towards the end of last year.
I’m pleased with the direction of travel of the national voting intentions. But the point I made to Kunal was that the media are reporting a minimal amount of data from the marginal seats in comparison to these headline figures, coupled with comments about uniform swing and the likely balance of seats in the next parliament. The reality is that Labour can be narrowing the overall gap in intentions but that it could be making little difference to the outcome of the election if those people aren’t living in the right constituencies. My hunch was that were we to see more polling from the key seats, we’d probably find the Tories with a wider gap than the 7/8 per cent that has been accepted right now as roughly the difference nationally. Morale-wise, this close to the election – and given how the parliamentary party in particular has reacted to polls in recent years – it’s perhaps best that we don’t see such polls and stay focused on the task in hand …
However, there are some out there and today I’ve come across an interesting analysis by Anthony Wells for UK Polling Report of Ipsos-MORI’s aggregated data for 2009 (that is, all their polls combined), followed up on by Andrew Sparrow. What we see is the Tories – last year, so not accounting for the recent downturn in their fortunes – having a 5% larger lead (a somewhat formidable 21% lead) in Lab-Con marginals. The swing to the Tories in these seats is greater than the swing in safe Labour seats and quite significantly better than that in safe Tory seats.
In other words, they appear to be winning over voters where it matters. There’s one reason for that: a certain Lord Ashcroft. Which is why it’s so important his personal tax situation is clarified.
The lesson is that we mustn’t get complacent about the direction of travel and about the electoral system working in our favour. And we mustn’t stop the fight.
UPDATE: I forgot to include a link to some recent ICM polling of marginals for the News of the World.
