Will UKIP get more votes than the Lib Dems in 2015?

[Gary J]

The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but I would say no. Looking at local by-elections for some clues, Lib Dem results will be patchy. In some areas the vote will collapse, compared with 2015, but in others it has the potential to hold steady or increase.

Even now, in mid term, the Lib Dems are actually winning more local by-elections than UKIP. This difference, in results, should be more pronounced in a general election.

It would be interesting to see what would happen in a parliamentary by-election in a traditional Conservative-Lib Dem marginal. The dynamic of such a by-election might be completely different to what has happened in any of the contests so far in this Parliament.

I was involved, a bit, in the recent Pinkneys Green local by-election in Maidenhead. In a stronger than average Lib Dem ward (where even in the last Council election, which was a disaster for the Windsor and Maidenhead Lib Dems, they managed to retain one of the seats in the ward) the Lib Dem by-election candidates percentage vote went up slightly. UKIP came no where near winning, but seems to have cut into the Conservative vote sufficiently for an eight vote Liberal Democrat victory. Note that the reason the Lib Dems won was because they had the ability to improve their vote share. If the candidate had polled the same percentage as in the previous election, he would have lost again despite the UKIP intervention.

This Pinkneys Green sort of scenario might well happen in selected areas, during the next general election.