Paula Surridge has written a post on her PS: Polling Snippets blog looking at the political views of people who voted Liberal Democrat in this year's general election, and in particular of those who cast tactical votes for us.
Her conclusions?
These voters who won them scores of seats in the South of England did so because they really wanted to defeat the Conservatives and because the Liberal Democrats hadn’t upset them recently. To hold onto these votes both of these things will need to remain the case.
While the former can almost be taken as read, the later is a key challenge for the party as it juggles these voters with those who chose the Liberal Democrats as their first choice party but who may be more willing to consider the Conservatives in the future.
And:
A strategy aimed at positioning the Conservatives closer to Reform seems like a gift to the Liberal Democrats, creating a space for them to oppose the government and delineate themselves from the Conservatives. But they will need to remember that a significant part of their success rests on a group of voters who may be very unforgiving of any perceived slights to their liberal-left agenda.
It may be the LibDems turn to carry the electoral Ming vase, albeit with the Conservatives seeming keen to offer some bubble wrap in case of minor slips.
This is in accord with my experience of campaigning. The core Lib Dem vote is an anti-Conservative one, and we win seats, or put ourselves in a position to win them, by uniting the anti-Conservative vote.
For some objective proof, look at what happened after we went into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010. Our opinion poll figures dropped in six months from 23 per cent to 10 or 11 per cent, but why?
Nick Tyrone wrote on Lib Dem Voice a couple of years later:
A common answer I get when I ask fellow Lib Dems how many points they think we lost post tuition fees is “about 8%”.What I want to do here is not to discuss the pros and cons of the 2010 Higher Education Act, but simply to lay to rest this lazy assumption and to reassert objective reality. Because the fact is that our poll numbers had fallen to the 10/11% level we’re used to now weeks before the Browne report had even landed.
It wasn't the policies of the our coalition with the Conservatives that lost us more than half our voters: it was the fact we joined it at all.
To finish, there's an irony to the debate over whether the Lib Dems should move its economic policy rightwards to attract more disillusioned Conservative voters. It's that we managed to fight the last election without talking about economics much at all.
4 comments:
It seems to me that the key challenge for the Lib Dems is how to reconcile "freedom from" liberalism with "freedom to" liberalism. TW
I would agree the sin was not Students, it was going along with Tory austerity. This was in the air back then. Blair had wanted a Fundamental Spending Review. Cameron was going to top that. Making a "big open offer" to the Lib Dems would include that. We failed to state a red line on austerity. You can tell that some people are sensitive about that even now from the reactions you et if you mention it. There was a yawning void after 2008, and a bun-fight about who would pay for that had to happen.
All three major parties fought the 2010 general election committed to spending cuts, but their leaders did not want to talk about them. Have a look at the debate transcripts and you will see this.
The dominant Lib Dem voice on economics at the start of that campaign was not Nick Clegg but Vince Cable. He always said he was against sudden deep cuts, because they would tip the economy into recession and make the deficit problem worse.
So it's hard to blame our voters for feeling let down by the way things turned out.
And - as always - and as Labour is discovering - where does the money come from? Britain is now in more debt than ever and all we hear is spend more money but don't raise tax.
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