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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » There could be a swing-back to the incumbent government – the yellow bit rather than the blue
One of the great hopes that has kept Tory spirits alive during this difficult person when consistent poll leads seem to elude the party is the well recorded pattern of swing-backs to the government.
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The 2010 Lib Dem vote had a much greater proportion of 'protest' votes - that are long gone.
Of course the other 'swing back' will be in Scotland - to the SNP.......
As yet we barely seen either Clegg or indeed any senior LD . Concentrating on holding what they've got is all very well but it''s not an inspiring strategy!
Just as I don't expect SNP to do as well as extreme polls so I don't expect LDs to have a cataclysm. Either might happen but they're not form horses and Brits like a bit of form. Unless you're the english cricket team. Dire.
Clegg's telegenic & a good speaker. As you say he's not yet had the chance to be unshackled from the coalition to pitch to his natural supporters.
The more I mull on this election the more I'm pondering that it won't be a HUGE deviation from last time. LDs maybe down to 20-30 at worst, SLAB maybe losing half seats. UKIP will make a splash but probably wind up with a handful of seats tops. Key national battle is same as for the past century - labour vs tories with clear differences between them.
Yes, "hope". I'm afraid it's nothing more than that.
That's an interesting statistic Mike and one of which I was unaware. I suspect that right up to election day in 2010 Labour's seats spread was well below their eventual score of 257.
Although this time I don't have Sporting's precise starting numbers to hand, I suspect that the Tories have already advanced around 12-15 seats against Labour, having been initially quoted around 8-10 seats behind the Red Team approximately two months ago, they are now 3 or 4 seats ahead. This despite there having been virtually no movement between these two parties in the polls, with Labour continuing to hold a small but seemingly tenacious lead.
[Isam if you're up what the hell are you on about? Four times what? PM me please as I may not get back on here today. Got to get to work.]
One major problem for the Lib Dems is that there are simply more parties competing for the public's attention. The chances of the Lib Dems capitalising on their airtime are diminished if they have a smaller share of airtime.
Applies equally if you substitute Blue for Yellow.
And backed with a more credible chance of delivery.
The lefties now hate you and aren't coming back.
The successes of the government are associated with Dave n Ozzy not (however unfairly) with Clegg.
The LDs are seen as cravenly and unthinkingly supportive of all things European - which given current state of the EU / Euro / Greece just looks nuts.
Seen as rank liars by some - eg tuition fees promises. Remember the very funny 'I'm sorry' Clegg video song?
You're assuming that when campaigning starts the LDs can revert to their old 'all things to all men' ways. 5 years in government will make that alot harder. Selling a message to the lefties and to the orange bookers at the same time is going to require major contortionism.
The Cleggasm is ancient history. In the country he's a joke now. That can't help.
I think the LibDems will drop to a historic low in terms of vote share (8% is my guess) but will retain a surprisingly solid number of seats on the back of that.
But LD support has declined year on year throughout this parliament. The Greens bite deepest into the LDs, and they now have membership (and activists?) to match. Given Green Party supporters profile (half voted LD in 2010) I assume they are strongest in LD seats.
I'm expecting to see LD support decline further rather than recover.
Swingback occurs in two stages. In the first stage support bleeds away from a government making difficult or unpopular decisions. In the second stage voters who have bled away come around to the idea that the lot they voted for the last time is, at the very least, better than the alternatives and so they come back to the governing party.
Applying that to the Coalition it has always seemed unlikely to me that the Tories would gain significantly from swingback. The conditions are just not there. Those who voted for them because they at least took the deficit more seriously than the rest have had nowhere else to go and we still don't. So their support has remained remarkably loyal with polling only just dipping into the 20s at the very worst. Conservative to Labour switchers have been almost non existent throughout this Parliament.
The only element of support they have lost is about 5% to UKIP. Some of that may come back in seats where Labour is the enemy on classic swingback theory but the scope for improvement is modest.
The Lib Dems on the other hand have had a complete collapse in support throughout the Coalition. If anything they have more opportunity for swingback than any government in recent memory. Why would this happen? Well, if you are a vaguely lefty voter in the south west you have a binary choice as the election comes around. You either vote Lib Dem or you vote Tory. On the better than the other lot theory some at least will come around. We already see that in the polling.
Of course I do think there are limits on this and the Lib Dems are still in for a doing. But it will not be as bad as it looks at the moment.
Your own son agrees with my forecast so please leave out the petulant stroppiness every time your analysis is critiqued.
My first sell was at 273, which I think was SPIN's opening pitch. So they are up 6, despite zero improvement in the polls, as you indicate.
In fact right now it's possible to back the LibDems to win 33 seats or more with Betfair at decimal odds of 4.0 (3.85 net of comm'n). Based on Mike's expressed confidence for the yellows as expressed in this thread header, I feel sure he'll be lumping onto this bet.
We shall see.....
This is the main reason I am expecting them to lose nearly 30 seats. That and Scotland of course where their collapse has made the fall in their support in England look like a minor local difficulty.
Similar to Sporting Index Spread
Count 318
Cons (Avg) 284.69
Lab (Avg) 280.43
Lib Dem (Avg) 27.26
UKIP (Avg) 4.38
Green (Avg) 1.01
SNP (Avg) 33.11
Chicken and egg I guess!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_West_England_(European_Parliament_constituency)#Election_results
On the basis that the Lib Dem councillors who lost their seats were elected largely on the efforts of others, their loss will not have as great an impact on future campaigning as you seem to imagine.
In the ward where I live, we have a Tory councillor, who does not do campaigning. It is managed for him by the Tory office. Five years ago, the constituency was thought to be a marginal, so there was a lot of effort from the Conservatives. It is now considered to be safe, and the Tory campaign so far is negligible. So he could prove vulnerable to a good, hard-fought Lib Dem local campaign.
Is the contention really that the Liberals will do better because UKIP *might* eat into the coverage given to the Reds and Blues? Really? Because that will also be eating into the coverage given to the Liberals. It will also be presenting - very visibly - an alternative protest vote to the Liberals, one that the polling shows is far more appealing to the English and Welsh public.
The Liberals massively benefited from the Television gerrymandering in 2010, they had almost equal coverage with Labour and the Tories during the campaign (unheard of) and no longer command the polling to justify this. Even if their broadcast hours weren't being slashed they now have to share the alternative platform with UKIP, the Greens and more often than not SNP/Plaid.
The only outcome is that the Liberal voice will be squeezed much harder. The editorials claimed benefit is the Liberals biggest problem - and not one they can do anything about.
In Scotland the LibDems go into this election with their Holyrood now small enough to travel in a single taxi and their councillor numbers depleted all over the country. The best the LibDems can hope for is that voters will feel sorry for them and actually vote for them. I of course hope that most LibDem MPs and candidates in "Tory winnable" seats get pounded like dockside hookers. Happy for them to hold the seats they are defending against Labour.
Either the spreads were very wrong when first put up, or there has been some highly irrational punting.
Or maybe the polls are wrong. (I'm told that a poll is always wrong if it doesn't say what you want it to.)
Neither am I (anymore) for that matter.
Mike detested Gordon Brown, and was full of enthusiasm when the coalition was first formed. He became pissed off with the Tories after what he perceived as dirty tricks over electoral reform and ratting on the House of Lords reform. It annoyed him even more that they took credit for some of the Lib Dem initiatives, such as the income tax allowance rise, whilst the Lib Dems themselves sank in the polls.
So he now wants the Tories to be punished, and is even thinking about tactically voting Labour, and is in denial about the Lib Dems electoral position.
That explains the shift in the editorial positions over the last 5 years.
No BBC livefeed again for F1, but Sky has one, for those wanting to follow things.
Mr. Putney, Melbourne, after watching the first race of the season?
I think OGH and other Libdems also underestimate the extent to which voters in places like Yeovil constituency were "none of the above voters" rather than sympathisers with Libdem policies and will decamp en masse to UKIP & Green, along with Labour tactical voters decamping back to Labour or voting Green, who incidentally did not stand in 2010 in Yeovil.
@patrickwintour: Lib Dems claim there is a bit of a swingback in some of its key seats. Some reasons for them to be cheerful . http://t.co/Omi1M2tTE0
However any small shift in the polls would be welcome.The real challenge for them is to get opinion polls from single to double figures before the dissolution of Parliament.so far getting into the air war has been tough most TV coverage has been about the Con/Lab battle.Political broadcasts can help.The Tory broadcast earlier this week was a class act -Vox pops from individual businesses talking about the recovery and minimal talking from politicians -just ashort segment from Cameron who pools above his party but really it sought to givr the Cons credit for the recovery.The LD's could learn a lot from that.One lesson is that because Nick Clesgg polls worse than his party other well known LD such as Vince Cable should appear on some of the broadcasts.
The real battle for the Lib Dems is in the LD /Con marginals.like the SNP ?lab marginals small swings can give or take away large numbers of seats.Currently polls suggest a 5% swing from Ld to con yielding 16 gains for them.However a sing back to the Ld,s of just 2.5% would reduce that figure to only 8 whilst further swing to the cons of 2.5% would increase it to 24.There are still a lot of seats to play for.
Lab gain with very small majority (against the national trend) in 2010.
In 2015 I consider it a safe enough seat to lend my election effort 10 miles North in order to give decapitation a good go.
The problem with the Libdems is that they are over dependent on reason and legalistic in their mindset.
The voters are animals who operate on instinct.
A good example is Britishness, to a Libdem someone with a British Passport is fully British. They cannot understand why many people will regard someone non-christian from a country that dosent speak English with few cultural links who has a British passport will be regarded as non-british by many, while a C of E Australian who does not have a British passport will be regarded as British by many; because they legalistically define it through the holding of the passport, whereas many instinctively define it through kith and kin. This underestimation of instinct is at the root of their electoral woes.
However, I was fully expecting the Lib Dems to be be polling 12% by now.
I think the problem for the Lib Dems, apart from Nick Clegg's toxic ratings is that they very publicly acted like they didn't want to be part of the coalition (I mean who can forget the plethora of Lib Dems slagging off the Tories to any pretty undercover journalist who batted their eyelashes at them.)
Is hard to take credit for the successes of the coalition when you're telling the world you feel like Emperor Valerian.
What a complete shower England are, poor Nigel's Kane Williamson bet might be buggered now.
Turns out Captain Morgan's appointment might not be as rum as I first thought
are in Con-Lib marginals where the electorate are
sufficiently right wing and extreme as to view those
two (and UKIP) as the credible candidates
In all seats where normal people live Lab-Lib marginals
or Lib-SNP battles the yellow Tories will be wiped out...
including their leader who represents an area where there
is zero Liberal history but instead only a desire by people
in the Hallam seat to stop the Tory and join the rest of the
fine city as a Tory free zone
Clegg is now seen as a virtual Tory in Sheffield..hence he will
lose as the anti blue S Yorks vote swings behind Labour..Simon
Hughes could also lose this way too...all in all though the Libs
will be thankful for FPTP for even hanging on to 15 or so seats
Ross, Skye Lochaber
Southport
Sutton & Cheam
Torbay
Cambridge
St Ives
2) The article says Clegg holding Sheffield Hallam, a few weeks ago, Survation had Clegg losing Sheffield Hallam.
Signing a pledge to do X, making it their core offer and doing the opposite is probably their biggest problem.
They are in exactly the same position as the Tories would be if they had joined the Euro.
Another problem is that they presented themselves as a safe receptacle for anti-Tory votes and then propped up a minority Tory party for five long years.
Isn't there a hefty blue vote in Sheffield Hallam?
On the other points, frankly he was just in denial. The Tories were always upfront they would campaign against AV. And Cameron always knew he couldn't deliver his party on HoL reform, so he didn't promise to.
But he was just looking for excuses to dislike the Tories.
The only petulant types on here are the very odd hordes of self-congratulatory PBTories who prefer anecdotes based on their own mates to polling. Mike is right: polling and analysis vs PB Tory wishful thinking.
Hughes is an exceptionally popular local MP. His odds of 8/15 look right to me.
Not sure about Clegg. Yorkshire not my patch. See Morris Dancer.
But our shield has been well battered and now it is time to discard it and move into the fray
I have long believed that we will see a "yellow swan" event during the campaign, a dramatic repositioning of the Liberal Democrats that will force people to take note and which could be transformational. It might be as simple as a change in leadership (signalled, if not immediate) or as dramatic as a schism. I accept now the odds of that are decreasing, but I would not rule it out, and if it happens it could result in quite a dramatic shift in the electoral dynamics.
As it is, the LDs best chance of recovering some ground lies in wooing the small army of former LD voters who have been propping up the Labour vote. If the LDs can gain 3-4 per cent, mostly at the expense of Labour, that alone would almost certainly result in another Con-Lib coalition, if the respective parties can be made to swallow it, or a Con government. Which rather demonstrates the LDs challenge...
Worth noting that lots of people think Yorkshire = Labour/anti-Conservative.
In parts of the People's Republic of South Yorkshire that's true, but Sheffield Hallam's pretty swanky. Similarly, swathes of North Yorkshire are bluer than a drowning smurf.
I do think Balls will hold on here. Alas.
Meanwhile Tories on 32% with YouGov. Where they've been since 2012.
#Flatline
I expect that record to remain unblemished.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/politics/9447962/why-the-lib-dems-arent-scared-of-this-election-and-why-they-should-be/
"Why the Lib Dems aren’t scared of this election (and why they should be)
Their message sounds good. But will anyone hear it?"
"Senior Lib Dems fear that lack of [media] coverage could do them serious damage. In private, Liberal Democrat ministers admit that the party is unlikely to hold more than a handful of the seats where Labour came second to it in 2010. And only a few seats in Scotland are safe from the SNP surge. So the key to the Lib Dems’ electoral performance will be how they do against the Tories. If they are going to keep more than half their seats — the minimum acceptable return — they will have to beat back their coalition partners....."
"But their worry is that the more they are squeezed out of the news, the harder it will be for them to get this message across. It will become far simpler for the Tories to persuade voters in these seats [Libdem Tory Marginals like Somerton and Frome and Sutton and Cheam] that you have to vote for them because Miliband is too much of a risk with the economy"
followed this site though never posted before ..though have
on the Speccy and Labour List and mainly on Dan Hodges
Ed bashing columns prior to the Torygraph stopping any
comments on their hacks efforts.
Yes there always has and still is a strong Blue presence in Hallam
mainly as it is the company director, ex footballer etc area of
the city and under One Nation type Toryism of the 45 to 79
variety would no doubt have remained so to this day
However since Thatcherism the city has moved even more to
the left in response...Clegg benefited from that (in fact the Libs
briefly took council control a few years into Blairism as the
city responded angrily to Labours rightward lurch) .and the
strong student vote to build his majority up to its current strong
looking one
However it is built on sand..the vote he got was a Anti Tory vote
and as polls now show its a Lab-Lib fight in May in Hallam then
Coppard is a great value bet at odds against as the mood in the
city will be for the elections "Portillo" moment to come this time
in the City of Steel
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/revealed-daily-record-poll-shows-5195216