Two big truths have emerged so far from YouGov’s daily (well, five a week) polls.
The first is that the contest between Labour and Conservative has narrowed in recent weeks. In six polls we conducted between Christmas and mid-February, every survey put the Conservatives on 40% +/- 2, and Labour on 30.5% +/- 0.5. Those figures would probably give the Tories a narrow overall majority in the new House of Commons.
Since then, the race has narrowed. Eleven of the most recent 12 of YouGov’s surveys have put the Tories on 38-39% and Labour on 32-33%. On a uniform swing, the average – 38.5%-32.5% – would produce a virtual dead-heat, with 293 Conservative MPs and 290 Labour MPs (and 38 Liberal Democrats).
However, as we saw in YouGov’s poll last week for Channel 4 News, the swing to the Tories in Labour-held target seats is higher than in the country as a whole. My rule-of-thumb is that the extra swing is likely to be worth about 20 seats. On the other hand, I expect the Tories to win around ten fewer seats from the Liberal Democrats than a uniform swing calculation would suggest.
So my best guess is that a 38.5-32.5% election result would give the Conservatives 303 seats, Labour 270 and the Lib Dems 48. David Cameron would become Prime Minister, with substantially more MPs than Gordon Brown.
The second big truth is that two of the stories that attracted huge media attention in the past fortnight have had little or no effect on the parties’ standings. The first was the ‘Bullygate’ affair – the allegations that Gordon Brown was prone to losing his temper and behaving badly, especially towards his own Downing Street staff; the second was the disclosure last week that Lord Ashcroft, the Conservatives’ deputy chairman and major donor, was a ‘non-dom’ who paid taxes in the UK only on his UK earnings.
In both cases, the public’s response has been ‘so what?’ Thus: a Prime Minister sometimes shouts and swears in frustration – so what? And a billionaire Tory seeks to minimise his tax bill – so what? This is not to say that either story might yet inflame voters: if, for example, Mr Brown were shown to be incapable of rational judgement when losing his cool; or if Mr Cameron were shown to be a weak leader and a poor judge of character. But, after some days of often lurid front-page stories, neither criticism has yet stuck.
Voters are more interested in the impact politicians and parties are likely to have on their own lives. As ever, politics is about bread and circuses. The Bullygate and Ashcroft sagas belong to the circuses section of political life – when it is the bread section (a.k.a. ‘the economy, stupid’) that really counts.
One of the many advantages of daily polling is that we have been able to monitor the (non-) impact of these stories day by day. And if something happens between now and election day that DOES get voters worked up, we shall be able to monitor that, too.
