From TPM Reader NS …
The first of the three leaders’ debates — unprecedented in a British election — has changed both the polls and the dynamics.
The lay of the land:
– as a governing force, Labour is exhausted after 13 years, but not discredited by the economy in the way the Tories were in 1997. – the Tories haven’t sealed the deal that they’re the replacement governing party – the Lib Dems (and especially their leader, Nick Clegg) lack experience, but also have relatively clean hands.
The standard line from the Lib Dems has long been that if they got the votes of everybody who liked their policies but didn’t think they could win, they’d win. Clegg was considered the winner of the debate by a large margin, which perhaps doesn’t mean that people are imagining him as PM, but there’s a growing sense that the Lib Dems are no longer also-rans. The Observer’s tick-tock makes for good reading.
Both the Tories and Labour will be looking to give Clegg and the Lib Dems a bruising in the next three weeks, so I wouldn’t expect the surge to last, nor am I certain what a rough three-way split would do in terms of constituency results across the electoral map, even before considering the nationalist vote in Scotland and Wales and the potential of spoiler parties like UKIP and the execrable BNP. (Tactical voting will again be significant here.) The Tories want the Lib Dems to take votes from Labour. Labour wants the Lib Dems to take votes (and seats) from the Tories, but not too many. MORI’s Bob
Worcester, again in the Obs, runs the numbers here:The Lib Dems have a reputation for feisty local campaigning, with the accusation that a Lib Dem in, say, the south of England who’s challenging a Tory incumbent will campaign very differently from a Lib Dem in the north of England challenging a Labour incumbent — almost to the point that you’d think they represented two separate parties. That’s not much different from previous years, but the contrast is more visible now than in years previous, and may be used against them However, instead of the recent election narrative where gaffes and bloopers and gotchas on the campaign trail drive the agenda, this year everything seems to be built around the debates — for their “American” novelty and focus on the leaders. How much that influences the wider voting public — and gets people to vote, amid widespread apathy — we’ll know in due time.
My gut feeling is that a large section of voters quite like the idea of a hung parliament, horse-trading and potential coalitions. Though you can’t actually vote for that outcome, the pollsters can predict it based on voting intentions, and people may “lock in” their votes in a way that’s designed to do just that.
It may all look a bit Canadian on May 7th, leaving the UK with a minority government that nearly two-thirds of the voting public didn’t want. But possibly not. And if Lib Dem votes are required to keep a government in power, their price will be a reformed voting system, and *that* will change the nature of British parliamentary government permanently.
