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Tuesday, March 17, 2015
The first general election with an unpopular Lib Dem leader
My memory of general election campaigns goes back to February 1974, but the 2015 campaign will be a first.
It will be the first election the Liberal Party or the Liberal Democrats have fought with an unpopular leader.
Jeremy Thorpe, David Steel, Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy were all wildly popular with the voters, even if it was sometimes possible to wonder why.
The one leader who was not popular with the public, Ming Campbell, was defenestrated before he could fight an election
In 2010 Nick Clegg was popular, even if the Cleggmania engendered by the first televised leaders' debate had largely dissipated by the time polling day came.
But in 2015 Nick Clegg is not popular. the latest Ipsos MORI poll to ask about such things found that his approval rating was a lowly -36.
All of which means that Nick Barlow is probably right when he says we should not expect the Liberal Democrats' poll ratings to go up during the election campaign just because they always have.
Perhaps wisely, the optimists in the party are looking to a strong incumbency factor for our sitting MPs as the key to our defying the national opinion polls, and some constituency polls do give them a rational basis for their optimism.
"All of which means that Nick Barlow is probably right when he says we should not expect the Liberal Democrats' poll ratings to go up during the election campaign just because they always have.
ReplyDeletePerhaps wisely, the optimists in the party are looking to a strong incumbency factor for our sitting MPs as the key to our defying the national opinion polls, and some constituency polls do give them a rational basis for their optimism."
The trouble with this is that the national polls also sample seats with Lib Dem incumbents, so by polling day any incumbency boost in those seats should be included in the national poll rating, even for the standard voting intention question ("How would you vote if there were a general election tomorrow?").
If the national poll rating doesn't go up - and it's currently only 7% according to Anthony Wells's average - then the arithmetic becomes very difficult. Just staying in contention in seats currently held would require about half the national vote to be concentrated in only 10% of the seats (rather than maybe a fifth of the national vote in 2010). Is that achievable?
The fact that we go into the election with an unpopular leader is reality. The issue is what we do about it. The answer from "Paddy's wheelhouse" seems to be twofold:
ReplyDelete1) Keep phoning and calling on people ("never mind the quality feel the width") and
2) Ignore any other MP's in the campaign and feed the public on a diet of 'Clegg, Clegg and more Clegg' in the hope the voting public will realise the error of their ways and agree with Paddy that Clegg is the greatest Liberal since Gladstone.
We need a re-think and quickly. The tragedy is some Liberal Democrats ARE credible, but are never put on TV or on PPBs. Why not show the public Lynne Featherstone on equalities, Julian Huppert on Science and Civil Liberties, Steve Webb on Pension Reform, Martin Horwood on the environment etc.
I'm afraid Clegg's acolytes are in denial, they think he's wonderful, the public do not, so the public must be wrong.
Bertold Brecht once said "the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government. And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier in that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?"
Trouble is that is exactly the attitude of the Clegg bunker!
The problem is not Clegg as such. The problem is that traditional radical Liberals like me do not recognise their party any more. Bedroom tax, students fees, massive public service cuts. That is a Tory programme - and a right-wing Tory programme at that - not a Liberal one.
ReplyDeleteThe electorate in Hallam will get rid of Clegg - but that will not make any difference to public attitudes towards the Lib Dem brand. It is wrecked for a generation in the same way Labour was in the 1980s.
Re: Anonymous #1's comment about national polls reflecting incumbency.
ReplyDeleteAssume an internet or telephone poll, with a sample size of ~850 for England, Wales and Scotland -- as published today by Ipsos-MORI. That's not even one and a half respondents per constituency.
One in eleven constituencies (excluding Northern Ireland) has a Lib Dem incumbent MP. So incumbency may affect ~77 respondents, at least half of whom aren't probable supporters of the incumbent.
We can conclude that in a national poll, voting for the popular local will generate a tiny error on party support measure compared to all of the other errors. If you increase the sample size to 10,000, incumbency may affect decimal points in the aggregate stats -- but the effects remain small.
Phil Beesley
ReplyDeleteSorry - I don't quite understand your point. Mine was that by polling day, Lib Dem support will be accurately represented in the national polls, incumbency and all. Certainly it's a small effect, but sadly that reflects reality. Blame Nick Clegg for that, not me.
I may dislike the Lib Dems and despise Clegg, but I like your blog. Before Clegg, the Lib Dems were a great party, and one day they will recover.
ReplyDelete