Can they be won back by the election?

Tucked away in the detailed data of the latest ComRes poll is one scary statistic for Brown Central.

A total of 240 of those surveyed said they had voted for the party that was then led by Tony Blair in 2005 – Yet over the weekend when the fieldwork was taking place only half of them, precisely 120, told the pollster that they planned to do so next time.

This is the full split of the 240 Labour 2005 voters:-
120 (half) voting Labour again
41 (one sixth) voting Conservative
15 (one in sixteen) voting Lib Dem
7 (more than one in forty) voting SNP/PC
6 (one in forty) voting Green
4 (one in sixty) voting BNP
5 said they were voting for another party
Remainder saying “not voting”/”don’t know”/”won’t say”

ComRes allocates 100% of those saying they will vote but refuse to say who for in accordance with the party the respondents say they most identify with – a measure that generally boosts the Labour share.

There was, of course, a little bit of seepage from the Tories and LDs but nothing on the scale of Labour’s 2005 voters. In fact the total of Tory losses on 2005 was dwarfed by the other votes that it was picking up.

There were, of course, others in the survey who, for whatever reason, did not vote in 2005. Of the overall party totals that make up the headline figures nearly a quarter of all the Labour vote came from 2005 non-voters. The Tory and Lib Dem shares consisted of only one in five who had not voted in 2005.

I have long argued that the non-voting in 2005 segment of the the sample are the ones that you can least count on.