LAB’s GE17 performance is misleading as a tactical voting guide because since then its reputation has been tainted by antisemitism
There weren’t front pages like this before GE2017
So far the LAB GE19 campaign has been dominated by furious attacks like the one above from the Jewish Chronicle and nearly half a dozen candidates having to stand aside because they are on record as stated things that can be seen as anti semitic.
For the Labour party that is going into this election continues to be afflicted by impact of it and its leader’s actions on this form of racism. One thing’s for sure this isn’t going to go away before December 12th.
An area critical to the campaign where this looks set to impact is on tactical voting which Corbyn’s party is hoping to benefit from as it did last time as being the best option to impede Brexit. Then it ended with a GB vote share of 41%. The latest YouGov has that at 25% a whopping 16 points short of two and half years ago.
If you look over the polling in this parliament all was going well for Labour from June 2017 till February 2018. In that period it enjoyed leads in all or the majority of polls each month. Then came the Corbyn mural row which triggered off a raft of negative coverage on antisemitism which has continued.
This impacted on both the voting intention polls and the leader ratings for Corbyn which are now at a record low. Every single voting intention poll bar one since Johnson became PM has had CON leads
There’s a big fight currently going on between different sites on tactical voting – which party you should support in each constituency to give you best chance of defeating Johnson’s pro-Brexit Tories. One faction is keen to focus almost entirely on what happened at GE2017 when LAB was at its peak. The other factions focus on other more up to data which is less helpful to the red team.
The problem with the GE2017 baseline approach is that this wants to take you back two and a half years before the antisemitism issue emerged. The fact is that this has had a profound impact and it is harder to argue what happened in a particular seat on June 8th 2017 is relevant. Before the last general election the Jewish Chronicle wasn’t running front pages like the one above.