Some general election thoughts

So the election is over and the polling industry had a bit of a nightmare. We'll get to that in a few days time as we pore over spreadsheets and come up with explanations and solutions. Our initial statement is here and we'll be putting up a more detailed breakdown later this week..

So here are some more general observations that came into my head as I powered myself through election night and the day after with eye watering quantities of coffee and red bull.


Read more »

Despite the hung parliament, who wins the election matters

Another one from "the other place" so, again, apologies about charts not quite fitting. This is about the potential legitimacy crisis that we're heading for if the party that 'loses' the election forms the government. In practice, I suspect that Conservative supporting newspapers will support any arrangement that puts the Conservatives back in office as just and proper while any arrangement that puts Labour in will be a stitch-up or a coup. Similarly for the Labour supporting papers.

Here's the actual post and I've added a few more comments at the end.

Most sensible predictions for the election are that, barring a late swing one way or the other, Britain will elect another hung parliament in May. Whether the Conservatives or Labour are the largest party varies between forecasts but, either way, on May 8th David Cameron and Ed Miliband will be scrambling around trying to put together a deal with the other parties to form a majority in the House of Commons.

In 2010 the fact that the parliamentary arithmetic so favoured a Conservative-Lib Dem deal meant that we didn’t face the issue of the party that ‘won’ the election not forming the government. That is much more of a possibility in 2015 and any government that emerges could face a crisis of legitimacy, regardless of what is constitutionally proper.

Read more »

A two tiered debate in 2015 looks more and more possible

I don't remember where I first read it but the most interesting solution to the "Farage" question when it comes to party leader debates in 2015 is to have two tiers or debates like they do in Germany and other countries with multi-party systems.

You take the two candidates most likely to be prime minister, in 2015 this will be David Cameron and Ed Miliband, and put them in a debate on their own and then take the leaders of all the other smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats and UKIP, potentially the SNP or Plaid depending on where it's being broadcast, and maybe the Greens and put them in another debate by themselves. This gives everyone exposure but doesn't create the sort of trainwreck that we saw with the Republican debates in the US in 2012 where you had one, maybe two, serious candidates and several others who were there to get exposure or sell books.

Obviously Nigel Farage would prefer a four-man (and it is men, how strange that 25 years after Thatcher resigned we'd still only have male leaders) debate with the leaders of the Conservatives, Labour, the Lib Dems and UKIP while Nick Clegg may want this or the same set-up as 2010. But it's hard to see David Cameron agreeing to it given his apparent regrets over the 2010 debates.

Having a separate Cameron vs. Miliband debate would no doubt work best for Cameron and the broadcasters would probably come around as well. The only sticking point would likely have been Miliband.

Until now.

In our polling for the Clegg-Farage debate last night we asked about whether voters would support or oppose this (it's near the bottom, just before we traumatised hundreds of people by forcing them to choose between Clegg and Farage for prime minister). The results were a bit mixed which suggests that people didn't really read it too carefully but as we get closer to 2015, the German option seems more and more like the only real debate compromise we'll get.

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:

Read more »