LAB’s most successful election winner the latest to question why Corbyn’s party isn’t further ahead
Tony Blair: 'Labour should be 20 points ahead in polls' https://t.co/DS8q4dkCM6
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) November 11, 2017
The record suggests that when LAB’s ahead the Tories are being understated
Tony Blair is the person of course, that people like Team Corbyn never like even to acknowledge even though he’s the one living LAB leader who has been an election winner. In fact he’s the only leader never to have lost a general election.
One of the points I like to highlight with red team supporters is that the last time a non-Blair led LAB won a sustainable working majority was Harold Wilson in 1966 – that’s more than half a century ago.
Before the last election there was a strong narrative from leading commentators that the polls just about ALWAYS overstate LAB thus even the substantial leads that many of the pollsters were showing for Team Theresa were an understatement.
That was rather dashed when the exit poll came out and supported the earlier Nate Silver analysis that the Tory understatement generally happened when they were behind in the polls.
Thus even Tony Blair went into the 1997 and 2001 elections with poll leads far in excess of what was achieved. That didn’t matter because he still won by big vote margins and was helped by the hugely efficient way the election system worked for the party.
Things have changed. Over the past two general election the Tories have been the prime beneficiaries of electoral bias thus reinforcing the main point of Blair’s latest observations. LAB leads needs now substantially higher then 2 or 3 points.
Remember in the run up to GE2015 EdM had many double digit leads but ended up with Cameron gaining a surprise majority.