Are surveys missing Labour and Lib Dem tactical voting?

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Good morning. Among other things, I’m very grateful to Inside Politics readers for forwarding me pictures of the campaign literature you get through your letter boxes, via text message or see advertised to you on social media.

I live in Stoke Newington, where to be blunt the most consequential elections take place within the Labour party, so my grip on what the political parties are saying to voters in marginal seats would be much weaker without these screengrabs and a huge amount of extra information about what is going on in local politics in your area.

Lately, after YouGov’s latest projection of what would happen if there were an election tomorrow, many of you have asked me a variation on the same question: are these surveys underestimating the scale of the Conservative defeat — to Liberal Democrat benefit?

(But please: don’t post leaflets, I feel very guilty about the cost of the stamps and I don’t need the physical versions in any case.)

Focal points

One Conservative party activist in Oxfordshire recently forwarded me a huge number of screengrabs from their Facebook and Instagram and a collection of posters — all from the Liberal Democrats, with a simple point:

I can’t move for leaflets saying that our constituency is a two-horse race [between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats]. Yet MRP thinks we will hold on with a very large Labour vote in third place. I think we’re stuffed.

I have received a lot of messages like this (many of them, I should say, much happier about this prospect than this activist).

I also get a lot of questions like this one:

In Bicester and Woodstock, there has been a strong Liberal Democrat county council performance, taking Conservative seats, and so a strong chance of a campaign looking to unite an anti-Tory majority based on the county council’s track record. The YouGov poll projects a Conservative win but apparently without much tactical voting. 

Here are the scores on the door for Bicester and Woodstock from YouGov’s MRP.

The constituencies I’m going to talk about today are all in Oxfordshire but my observations play out in other parts of the country too.

One of the striking features of local elections and parliamentary by-elections in this parliament has been the incredible willingness of Labour voters to vote Liberal Democrat, and vice versa. Labour council candidates in Lib Dem wards have done as badly or worse (!!) than they did during the aftermath of the Iraq war and in the immediate wake of the global financial crisis. Lib Dem candidates have done as badly or worse as they did during the coalition years. One thing I will be watching out for in the local elections is if this shows any sign of changing.

YouGov makes many entirely reasonable assumptions to try to simulate what will actually happen in an election for its MRP. Essentially the pollster is giving their best guess as to what will happen once the political parties start doing their thing and voters turn their mind to what happens in their own constituency. But getting the Lib Dems right is hard and it is something that various constituency modellers spend a lot of time worrying about.

And it is true to say that across chunks of the country, constituencies showing quite a large Labour vote in third place are not going to see or hear very much from the Labour party, in part because Labour has to make so many gains in order to win that it is already going to have to resource a huge number of seats.

The usual failure mode for Lib Dem general election campaigns is for the party’s reach to exceed its grasp and for the party to get a lot of very good second places but not to make many gains. Ed Davey and Mark Pack, the party’s president, are both incredibly seasoned campaign veterans who have seen that movie before. As a result the official Lib Dem campaign will be ruthlessly focused on a handful of seats.

In Oxfordshire, although there are many seats that the Lib Dems could win, they will, come election time, focus the attention of their official campaign on a handful of them. So is my Conservative activist being too pessimistic?

I think: probably not, no. Because there are national and local limits on what you can spend in a British election, all parties will try to game that a bit by double-dipping: the message, loud and clear across some parts of the UK will therefore be “only the Liberal Democrats can win here”. So from that perspective, it makes sense to look at seats where there is a large third-placed Labour vote and assume that vote will collapse to Liberal Democrat benefit.

But what we don’t know is whether the willingness to vote tactically among Labour and Liberal Democrat voters in local elections reflects a particular appetite to do so among the most engaged voters in the UK, the ones who actually vote in local elections, or reflects a bigger and deeper change in how voters are going to behave at the next election.

Now try this

The trick to seeing many films, I’ve found, is simple: find your local indie or art house cinema, check out their membership scheme, and put relatively little effort into working out what you are going to see and just use your free evenings or unexpected gaps in your schedule. At the moment, cinema is in a great place, creatively speaking, so you will see a lot of good things without trying very hard.

Unfortunately, from time to time you will see Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. It’s a mess. There’s a perfectly good young adult blockbuster about a blended family coming together to fight the supernatural and discover themselves, but it’s cohabiting uneasily with a grab-bag of references and callbacks to the first two Ghostbusters movies. Don’t take my word for it though — do what I should have done and listen to Jonathan Romney.

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Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.