15-19 December was the first complete week in which the Greens (7%) averaged higher than the Liberal Democrats (6%)
In recent weeks YouGov has registered an increase in support for the Green party. As aggregates of each month’s daily polls over the course of January to November 2014, Natalie Bennett’s party have felt a 12% gain among under-25s, rising to 19% – 5% behind Labour. On ten occasions, they’ve also outpolled the Liberal Democrats at the national level, to become Britain’s fourth largest party. And three times they’ve done so by two points, reaching their all-time national high of 8%.
But for this to become a trend, the Green party would have to begin averaging higher than the Liberal Democrats over the longer term, rather than outpolling them only on occasion.
There is now evidence that this is starting to happen. YouGov’s five daily polls this week had the Greens averaging 7%, ahead of the Liberal Democrats’ 6%. In the most recent poll, taken on Thursday-Friday, the Greens had an 8% share of the national vote, ahead of the Lib Dems’ 6%.
Natalie Bennett said on Friday that the high turnout by young people at the Scottish independence referendum showed that a party can overcome voter apathy if it has engaging policies. "If we saw young people, the under 25's voting at the same kind of levels as the over 60's do now, then you could actually break British politics wide open, and who knows how many seats we could win", she said.
