The chart that shows general election campaigns don’t matter (usually)
2017 election saw the biggest swing DURING an election campaign ever – uncertainty is the new normal pic.twitter.com/VVTCADtY0T
— Ben Page (@benatipsos) July 13, 2017
One of the axioms of British politics is that general election campaigns don’t matter, and the stats in the above chart by Ben Page of Ipsos MORI does back that up, with sub margin of error changes during past campaigns but the 2017 general election campaign really didn’t stick to past conventions.
The question was 2017 an outlier or the beginning of a trend? My instinct is that at the next general election campaign the Tories couldn’t run a worse campaign than 2017 even if they tried, so 2017 was an outlier of a campaign in my view, though I’m assuming neither Theresa May nor the gruesome twosome Nick Timothy & Fiona Hill will be involved in the next Tory general election campaign.