If you discussed the election with me just before polling day, you will be able to verify my claim; otherwise you will have to take my word for it. I told friends and colleagues that my biggest fear as a pollster was that we would overstate Liberal Democrat support. I suspected that some people said they would vote Lib Dem, and genuinely meant it; but, faced with a ballot paper they would recoil from their intended act of protest and vote for either a Labour or Conservative government.
And that, indeed, is what seems to have happened. Every poll published on May 6 put Lib Dem support too high. In contrast, the exit poll conducted by NOP and MORI, was incredibly accurate; this suggests that voters told the truth and changed their mind. As a result, YouGov correctly predicted that there would be a 5% swing from Labour to Conservative, and that the swing would be higher in Labour’s marginal seats; but, like everyone else, we wrongly predicted significant gains for the Lib Dems.
This point is relevant not only to pollsters and the National Union of Political Number Crunchers. It tells part of the story about the most extraordinary feature of the general election campaign: the impact on voters of the first TV debate by the three party leaders.
Since last week the conventional wisdom is that this impact made no difference in the end, for the Lib Dems ended up losing seats, not gaining them. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Before the first debate, Lib Dem support averaged around 19%. Afterwards it averaged 29%. On election day it slipped back to 24%. So the party retained about half the gains that Nick Clegg secured by his performance in that debate. Without those gains, I estimate that the Lib Dems would have won 20 fewer seats: 14 more would have been won by the Tories and six by Labour.
The political effect of those 20 "extra" Lib Dem seats has been huge. Without them the new House of Commons would have contained 321 Conservative MPs, 264 Labour and 37 Lib Dems. David Cameron would be so close to an overall majority that he would have been Prime Minister by the evening of Friday May 7. In other words, it is because of the extra votes that Clegg secured and retained following the first TV debate that the Tories have fewer seats than Labour and the Lib Dems, and that the prospect of an anti-Tory government could be entertained at all.
So the debates did make a difference. But is it now possible to add Labour’s 30% to the Lib Dems’ 24% and claim a progressive majority among Britain’s voters? Sadly, the answer is not clear cut.
During election week, YouGov asked people where they placed themselves on the Left, centre or Right. We offered three variations of Left and Right: “very”, “fairly” and “slightly”. At first sight, Labour and Lib Dem supporters look fairly similar, and very different from Conservative supporters. Labour supporters divide: 54% Left, 23% centre and 5% Right, while Lib Dem voters divide: 43%-29%-9%. Contrast those figures with the Tories: 5%-21%-57%. If that were the only evidence we had, then the conclusion would be irresistible: most British voters belong to one of the two tribes on the left bank of British politics, while only a minority belong to the one significant tribe on the right bank.
But that is not the only piece of evidence. When we asked the same Lib Dem voters which they would prefer if they had to choose, 51% plumped for a Labour government led by Gordon Brown, while 36% opted for a Conservative government led by David Cameron. So the advantage resides with Labour, but it is far from overwhelming – and very different from 2005, when Lib Dem voters opted by three-to-one for Labour/Blair over Conservative/Howard.
Among the electorate as a whole, the division is 47% Conservative/Cameron, 43% Labour/Brown. This tells a different story from that derived by totting up the votes and saying that progressive Lab-LD voters outnumber Conservative voters by 54% to 37%. However much we might wish otherwise, a Cameron-led government has greater public appeal than a Brown-led government. The margin is not great; and it is far less than it was for most of last year. But the notion that a Lab-Lib coalition would automatically command majority support is simply wrong.
That is not to say that, given the chance, a progressive coalition could never become popular. Voters change their minds (as around one million of them did on election day, deciding in the end not to vote Lib Dem). Indeed, the sheer variety of movements from day to day (especially after the first TV debate) and seat to seat – far greater than in any election in modern times – testifies to the erosion of traditional tribal loyalties. Voters are increasingly footloose. For those who remember their teenage physics, we are less and less like steel (hard to magnetise, but also hard to demagnetise) and more and more like iron (easy to magnetise and easy to demagnetise).
Two of the subplots in this election confirm this. Labour did especially badly in 2005 in constituencies with large numbers of students (because of tuition fees) and those with large numbers of Muslim voters (because of Iraq). This time, Labour support fell by half the national average in university seats – and actually increased by four points in seats with the highest share of Muslim voters. To some extent, easy go, easy come.
One final point. Despite Caroline Lucas’s stunning victory in Brighton Pavilion, this was not generally a good election for the smaller parties. The Greens secured almost exactly the same number of votes (285,000) as in 2005. The BNP won almost three times as many votes – but stood in almost three times as many seats; and the party suffered heavy defeats in Barking where Nick Griffin failed to lay a glove on Margaret Hodge and his party lost all their councillors. Only UKIP made any advances. Despite failing to unseat John Bercow, the Speaker, in Buckingham, their vote climbed to 917,000. Next time they could become the first distinct new party to pass the million mark at a general election since Labour did so almost a century ago.
This commentary appears in the current edition of the New Statesman
