The Tories go into Thursday’s locals in a much better national polling position than when the seats were last fought in 2014
TMay’s Tories doing better over Corbyn’s LAB than Cameron’s party was doing over EdM’s
Given that context is everything I thought it might be useful to show the national polling gap between the main two parties this year compared with what it was in 2014 when most of the seats up on Thursday will last fought.
Rather than show every single poll that was carried out in April 2014 and this month I have taken the average gap tha the Conservatives had over Labour for comparison. The big picture is that this year the Conservatives have a small but significant lead whereas four years ago Ed Miliband Labour had an even bigger margin
If this does reflect opinion and can be applied to local elections, and I do think that there are a lot of questions over that, then it adds more force to the view that maybe that LAB is not going to be a successful on Thursday as perhaps some of the earlier predictions.
This will of course be Mr Corbyn’s first major set of elections since the extraordinary recovery that the party saw at the general election in June 2017.easy
I should add a word of thanks to David Cowling for providing the data that has made this comparison easier for me to produce.