UK General Election - May 7th 2015

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why would UKIP being in favour of changing the electoral system make such a change more likely to happen? The LibDems (and their Alliance and Liberal predecessors) have been in favour - and a relevant political force - for even longer, and yet...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The list and the thinking behind it is kind of delusional, but that's to be expected from the Greens.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

They're currently polling at less than half their vote from the last election. That's kind of unprecedented.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

'Trendy' is not a word that has ever been knowingly associated with the LibDems.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I will remind everyone again that the people who vote - or at least voted - LibDem are not necessarily the people that you all seem to be assuming do/did. Surveys used to show that the most popular newspaper amongst regular LibDem voters was the Daily Mail...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well, that's because the Daily Mail is the overwhelmingly most popular middle-class newspaper,

That is precisely my point. LibDem support comes (came?) mostly from perfectly ordinary people, including large numbers who are neither particularly political nor particularly 'liberal' (in the usual sense of the word). Their main electoral selling point between the early 70s and entering government in 2010 was that they were 'different' (and that they were 'different' in a basically non-alienating way), which is why it was really quite difficult to generalise about their electorate...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

yet with a weird libertarian streak on sexual matters.

Translation: it prints pictures of tits on page three. Libertarian streak my foot; virulently homophobic rag back in the day.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Its the regional breakdown thats interestig. Who typically votes LibDem in Sheffield, Cornwall, Highlands etc.

The Liberal vote in the West Country has traditionally been a hick vote, for want of a better way of putting it. There used to be a big confessional element to this (i.e. the West Country is a deeply conservative region with no socialist tradition outside the cities and a couple of random other places, but is also an area with a strong Nonconformist heritage, particularly in remote areas. Nonconformists everywhere were usually pretty uncomfortable with the idea of voting Tory, which left the Liberals as the default option), though that's declined as a factor in recent decades.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Scottish polling won't be any use until certain things are clearer, but... eep.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

At this stage everything is assumption upon assumption, but it does tell us quite how serious the situation is. Got to start to deliver asap...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Though to add totally meaningless context a different (though also somewhat sketchy) outfit shows 35%.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

His national polls are untested and look pretty dodgy at this stage (they bounce around in a weird and illogical style).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

About as likely to happen as I a to join the Conservative Party.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Returning to the real world for a moment, everyone is aware that the SNP cannot be relied on in a parliamentary situation and in all likelihood no one would even try. It's a waste of letters to even speculate.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's also Opinium who are trash.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As many adverts here say, Offer Excludes Northern Ireland.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

No way is Tory support up from 2010 in Donny North; the government is less popular than ebola in the area and the Tories have performed hideously in local elections. Duff poll.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Did they only poll Sprotbrough or something? LOL

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Did they only poll Sprotbrough or something? LOL

They actually massively upweighted the 2010 Tory respondents and downweighted the Labour ones.  The unweighted figures in the same table (these are from Table 2, but the pattern is the same in the others) are Lab 368, Con 114, LD 47.

!??!?!

What were they even trying to do?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

LOL

Anyway, it has been confirmed that Gordon Brown is standing down. Which means that three of Fife's four MPs are retiring. In the last parliament two of four died.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

otherwise the current general election polling would mean a swing of Lib Dem voters directly to Ukip.

What's so absurd about that possibility? Of course a very, very significant percentage of the electorate are not really 'Party X Voters' at all, and then will be people who voted in 2010 who will not do so in 2015 and vice versa...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Be aware that as a collective group, voters are not noted for their ability to accurately remember who they voted for unless they always vote for the same party* so though this kind of thing can be interesting, it can never be anything more than interesting. I would tend to be even more suspicious of the value YouGov's internals than from other polling companies, but that's a minor point.

Though on the issue at hand, the fun part is that there are clear geographical differences. In and around London I doubt that many people (although there will still be some) who voted LibDem in 2010 will have even considered toying with UKIP. The situation is rather different out here in the provinces.

_{*And even then... well... an old man known to me would insist, if you ever asked him, that he has never voted anything other than Labour. I know for a fact that he voted Tory a couple of times in the 50s...}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The issue is more with YouGov's subsample data than with its overall findings. They use an internet panel that is not demographically representative* and then weight the hell out of it to make it artificially so. Admittedly this sort of thing is becoming more and more common across the board, so perhaps its unfair to single out YouGov, but whatever.

_{*According to how this is conventionally defined, blah, blah, blah.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ah, this appears to be mostly a misinterpretation issue. I'm not suggesting - and I doubt that anyone else is has or will - that all (or even most!) possible UKIP voters voted for the LibDems in 2010.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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