Study: Less than one twentieth of Labour’s current polling share is from #GE2010 CON voters

Study: Less than one twentieth of Labour’s current polling share is from #GE2010 CON voters

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The red team is too reliant on non #GE2010 voters and LDs

There’s some worrying news for Labour this morning from a Fabian society study of the make-up of Labour’s current polling standing. It finds that the total of CON>LAB switchers since May 2010 has been just 400,000 voters.

The study found that about 1.4m of thoose currently telling pollsters that they’ll vote Labour did not vote at all at the last general election.

    As I’ve repeatedly argued here the least valuable voters are those who didn’t turnout last time. ICM discounts their views by 50% when working out its monthly voting intention figures – one of the reasons why it tends to show the smallest LAB leads

Many of these 2010 “no-showers”, the report says, could be former Labour voters “who became disillusioned with the party in its latter years in office”. Maybe – maybe not. The big hope EdM according to the study is that it deduces that 2.3m LD GE2010 voters have switched.

This is however based on a reading of the numbers which doesn’t take into acccount the fact many pollsters gross up their voting findings to exclude the don’t knows and refusers.

Taking them into account, according to ICM polling (see page 2 of this PDF) just 20% of 2010 LD voters, little more than million, have switched to Labour. 28% said “don’t know”.

ICM generally finds that just 5-6% of 2010 CON voters are now in the LAB camp.

General elections are not, of course, won on national party vote shares but what happens in the 80 or so key battleground constituencies. Are incumbents, especially those who won for the first time in 2010, going to enjoy a special boost?

    My reading is that there’ll be a disproportionate LD>LAB switch in the LAB-CON marginals. It’s the scale of that which will determine whether Ed gets his majority.

The outcomes in the LD-CON battle-grounds are irrelevant to the big picture because they won’t impact on whether LAB scales the 325 seat threshold required for a majority.

Mike Smithson

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