Polling analysis: UKIP’s hurting CON even more in the marginals than it was 2 months ago
Latest churn figures from main parties to Farage’s
One of the great things about the Lord Ashcroft marginals polling is the sheer scale of it and the size of the overall samples. He tends to operate with samples of 1,000 meaning that the latest batch involved talking on the phone to a total of 11,002 people which is the equivalent to almost a year’s worth of ICM or Ipsos-MORI polls.
The benefit is that the aggregate data from all the constituencies provides large enough sub-samples on which to do analysis and in this post I look at the breakdown of the UKIP vote. The data in the chart above is produced by taking the total number of UKIP voters and dividing that by the numbers who voted for CON, LAB and LD at GE10.
I did a similar exercise with Lord A’s August round when he was polling CON held seats with smaller majorities.
As can be seen far more 2010 CON voters in these battleground seats have switched to UKIP than 2010 LAB or LD ones.
The comparison between the two two of polling is even more pronounced with the percentage of CON>UKIP switchers in the UKIP total up by more than eight points. The LAB switching is up by nothing like the same scale. LD switching, meanwhile, drops a bit.
How’s this going to shake out on May 7th next year? We do see in this polling that when asked to think about their own seats some UKIP supporters switch to the main two parties but not that many. My reading is that the UKIP will decline because the high-octane campaigning by both the red and blue teams will present the fight as a choice between them.
In other less marginal seats I expect that UKIP will hold up far more.