Posted by Prof Neil Carter
If you’d said to me a week ago that the Liberal Democrats would lead in two opinion polls over the weekend, I would have just laughed. Yet here we are in uncharted territory following the remarkable shift in the polls over the last few days. Previously, the first week of the campaign had seen very little movement in the polls. Yes, some individual polls were giving the Conservatives a lead in double digits, whilst others put the gap with Labour at just two points, but individual polls should be treated with considerable scepticism. It is better to look at the average of a whole raft of polls, and this figure was showing just a very slight narrowing of the Conservative lead over Labour to around 6% or 7%, which would leave David Cameron as the leader of the largest party in a hung parliament.
But, to paraphrase Harold Wilson, ‘a 90 minute prime ministerial debate is a long time in politics’. By universal acclaim, Nick Clegg ‘won’ Thursday’s debate, and subsequently the polls have, without exception, reported a dramatic transformation in the electoral landscape. In the five polls published since the debate, the Liberal Democrats have leapt from around 20%-22% to average 31%. For the first time since the SDP-Liberal Alliance led one poll in 1985, they have taken a clear lead in two of those polls. The Liberal Democrats are drawing support from both of the major parties. The Conservatives seem to have suffered the most, slipping to an average of 32%, which effectively undoes all the good work put in by Cameron since he became leader. Labour has slipped to third place in most of those polls, averaging just 28%. In short, we seem to have a genuine three party contest.
What does this mean for the election result? To be honest, it is impossible to tell at this stage, because we don’t know if the swing to the Liberal Democrats is uniform across the country, and, specifically, what is happening in the much touted marginal seats. But if the Liberal Democrats are drawing support from both the other parties, and the Conservatives remain well short of 40%, then we are likely to get a hung parliament. There needs to be a really big swing to the Liberal Democrats for them to start winning significant numbers of seats from either of the major parties, because the support for the other parties is geographically concentrated. So they would almost certainly remain the third largest party measured by seats won, albeit holding the balance of power. One interesting feature of the shift to the Liberal Democrats is that it is particularly large amongst young - under35 – voters, who hold no strong party affiliation. That poses the party with a problem: this is the section of the electorate that is least likely to bother to vote. Obama got this same group to turn out for him after months of high profile campaigning, but the Liberal Democrats have few resources and little time to persuade them to do so.
Will the polls bounce back? Quite possibly. The Tory and Labour attack dogs are starting to come out in force (as I wrote this blog Norman Tebbit came on air and like Simon Parker on Thursday night – see below - I was reminded of the 1980s). They are trying to expose the policies of the Liberal Democrats to greater scrutiny, although neither Cameron nor Brown will make it too personal for fear that they will appear too negative. Much may depend on this Thursday’s debate. Last week Clegg probably had the easiest job of the three candidates: he just needed to come over well and offer something different to a public deeply disenchanted with the established political system. Yet he did so with style and substance: Clegg looked the part and he also had something to say that was distinctly different from his opponents. But this week the spotlight will be on him. With the focus on international issues this time, his opponents, particularly David Cameron, will try to trip him up on policies where the Liberal Democrats hold views that may not have widespread appeal, such as their strong support for the EU, sympathy for the Euro and their plan not to replace the Trident missile system. If Clegg stumbles, and Cameron overcomes his uncharacteristic stiffness (maybe he over-rehearsed?), then the polls might start swinging back to the Conservatives. But it is hard to see Gordon Brown being anything other than Gordon Brown – he seems totally unsuited to the debating format. So, Clegg probably has most to fear from Cameron (especially as Brown apparently ‘agrees with Nick’ on almost everything anyway), but if he comes through well again, then the Liberal Democrats could even benefit from a snowball effect as more and more wavering voters join their bandwagon – then we really would be into a new electoral landscape. So, we await the next debate with surprising anticipation.
Rather like 1997, the public has fallen out of love with a government that has been in power for over a decade, but unlike 1997 people haven’t embraced Cameron in the way they did Blair (for a while). Clegg offered them a new and superficially appealing option last week – can he cement the relationship over the next couple of weeks? Either way, I’m confident that we will see continuing volatility in the polls over the next week or so, and perhaps all the way up to the election itself.
