Cross post:ex-Lib Dems and Miliband's low ratings

I just posted this on the Opinium blog which is me asking whether the fact that Ed Miliband generally gets lower ratings among Labour voters than David Cameron does among Conservative voters can be explained by the fact that such a large proportion of current Labour voters are former Lib Dems who decided to vote Labour the minute Nick Clegg and David Cameron stepped out into the garden for their first Number 10 press conference.

David Cameron's ratings are generally pretty high (80-90% of current Conservative voters approve of him) partly because the Conservative vote has shrunk since 2010 and current Conservative voters are likely to be closer to the core party loyalists than more sceptical, floating voters.
Conversely, Labour's share is about 7-8 points higher than 2010 and therefore includes the core vote of about 29% with the rest being people who have moved to Labour since 2010, including the sizeable block of ex-2010 Lib Dems. Hence Ed Miliband's ratings among Labour voters are generally around 50-55% with far more being in the "Neither approve nor disapprove" category than you get for David Cameron.

Unfortunately the theory doesn't work and, if you read the Opinium post, you'll realise that the title is a QTWAIN. Reasons are after the jump:



When we look at current Labour voters and split them between the ones that voted Labour in 2010 and those that voted Lib Dem in 2010, there's almost no difference in how these groups approve or disapprove of Ed Miliband or which economic team (Miliband and Balls vs. Cameron and Osborne) they would trust with the economy. They are as likely to approve of Miliband and about as likely to say Miliband and Balls are the ones they would trust with the economy although, understandably, a slightly higher proportion of ex-Lib Dems than 2010 Labour voters chose Clegg and Cable.

So is this good or bad news for Ed Miliband? I'd say a bit of both.

Obviously he'd like to have higher approval ratings and, perhaps crucially, more people expressing confidence in the abilities of Ed Balls and himself managing the economy. There's a debate about whether this spells doom for Labour or has already been "priced in" to current voting intention figures but enthusiasm from your own side is important and can affect the ground game of campaigning. If you're a political party you don't just want someone to vote for you, you want them telling all of their friends why they're voting for you and why everyone else should as well and offering to drive people to the polling station.

But if our figures had shown that 2010 Labour voters uniformly liked him and 2010 Lib Dems uniformly didn't and were just voting Labour to spite Nick Clegg then that would be bad too.

Remember that a big reason for Labour's current poll lead going back to 2011 is due to the mass defection of left leaning Lib Dems to Labour. Along with the rise of UKIP it's the defining point of political opinion polling in this parliament. If we assume that 2010 Labour voters are going to vote for the party regardless of what they think of Mr Miliband (they did vote for Gordon Brown after all) then surely it's better for him that both 2010 Labour and 2010 Lib Dem voters are lukewarm-to-positive about him rather than the former being adulatory and the latter holding their noses, rendering them susceptible to appeals from Nick Clegg in the run up to the 2015 election?

Mike Smithson makes the point repeatedly that voters who shifted from the Lib Dems to Labour are the key voting block for 2015, keeping Labour ahead of the Conservatives. Whether they stick with Labour or gradually move back to the Lib Dems matters more than many people realise in deciding who will win the 2015 election.

EDIT: There's more on this from Hopi Sen here