More people would never vote Conservative or Labour than Lib Dem
A regular theme of my writing about research into the attitude of voters towards the Liberal Democrats has been about how much of what the media, and politicians, say is based on a simple myth.
The coalition years of 2010-15 certainly did heavy damage to the party’s popularity, but they didn’t do long-term severe damage to the party’s brand in the way that, for example, Chris Leslie claimed when explaining Change UK’s (initial at least) desire to create a political party free from the Liberal Democrats.
Even by 2017, only 1 in 5 voters both thought the Lib Dems were wrong to go into coalition and hadn’t forgiven the party for doing so. Most people either thought the decision was right or had forgiven the party for doing so.
The long-term problem was not one of destruction of the party’s brand from the coalition, but rather a widespread sense that people didn’t know what the party stands for. Hence another common finding from research that the most common thing people say about the Lib Dems was variants on ‘don’t know what you are up to / believe in’ rather than ‘hate you’.
Hence, of course, the reason why I’ve been one of the first and loudest voices arguing for a core votes strategy for the party, with communicating what we believe and why at the heart of it.
New polling from YouGov (full data tables here) reinforces this picture, with 43% saying they would never consider voting Conservative, 39% for Labour and down to 35% for the Liberal Democrats. (A similar picture comes from YouGov’s previous party favourability ratings.)
That 35% comes heavily from Leave voters, no surprise. 51% of those who voted Leave in the European referendum would never vote Liberal Democrat, but only 16% of Remain voters. Those are, most likely (the cross-breaks aren’t given to show this for sure), predominantly left-wingers who are Remain and hate coalition. The sort of people who, in other words, are often vocal on social media and memorable on the doorstep but are also small in number and atypical in their views.
That breakdown by referendum voting also shows the wisdom of the Liberal Democrats in concentrating so heavily on targeting Remain votes – and having switched from a long-running policy of ‘We’re in favour of Europe… but we worry about Euro-sceptics in places like Devon’ to ‘We’re in favour of Europe… and bollocks to Brexit‘.
One final point to note with a nod to next year’s London Mayor and Assembly elections – London is disproportionately populated with those most willing to consider voting Liberal Democrat.
At face value, 35% still seems quite high though partly explained by the preponderance of Brexiters. This leaves a subset of the 35% of about 10% who are remainers who would never vote Lib Dem raising a real question – just who would they vote for?
I would like to know how different this 35% is to what it was before 2010. Not that it is necessarily so bad to have a large cohort against the Party, if these are people whose attitudes are inimical to social Liberal values.
Powerful conclusions from quality narrative Mark. As always – you get to the point. The authentic voices with clarity (we, the Brexit mob and to a lesser extent the Greens) got the lift whilst the big beasts languished. My only cynical concern is for the Greens to do a “lets save Labour” exercise and save Labour from itself by alliance or pact … that would be deeply worrying on a number of levels. What is your take on this? Coffee on me soon mate.
Who becomes Leader will be decisive on how well the LibDems capitalise on this! They attack LibDems because with Sir Vince Cable at the helm you had a man of great experience and Gravitas. He is very skilled at defending the party and getting out of tight spots. He is respected. I watched Jo Swinson last night on Sky and once again she failed to defend the party from a Tory attack. She is so uncontroversial, so sweet but that is not leadership material! She is invisible and she will make the party invisible.
Last night Tory MP on Sky said LibDems were the first to call for an EU referendum and she let it pass. Shouldn’t she have responded the LibDems called for an EU referendum only on the back of proposed substantial treaty changes, not one to have one to come out the EU.
I watched her before on an interview where she apologised for the coalition. Sir Vince Cable didn’t, it always comes up. Sir Vince said we provided stability at a time of economic crisis after the bankers crisis and we were able to mitigate some of the Conservative more extreme policies as can be seen in the last 3 yrs.
She should have these answers at the tip of her tongue because they come up time and time again. I do hope she isn’t elected leader.
I agree .
Yes I tend to agree with you
It’s so important now for the Lib Dens to select the right leader and build on their obvious success
Vince’s point about providing stability after the bankers crisis and mitigating some of the Tories most extreme policies should be repeated again and again. We cannot repeat them enough. Austerity and student loans are mentioned often enough. And every spokesman for the party on tv should have those points at their fingertips
If the LibDems did not have a fairly high percentage of those who detest us, then we wouldn’t have been getting our message across. STOP BREXIT is certain to get about 35% of the voters hating us. I can live with that if it establishes us as the ‘go to’ party for opposing Brexit. It seems to be working by the way!
There is another cohort who would probably never vote for us, namely some very left wing Labour people who hate us for supposedly enabling austerity and over tuition fees. This is more serious, but even here, I suspect that many of them would never vote for us anyway, and, if and when they defect from Labour, the Greens would be a more comfortable home for them. Not much we can do about these folk in reality and we certainly shouldn’t try to go wishy-washy and ‘nice’ just to please them. Such an approach wouldn’t work and would do damage by the wishy-washyness.
Best just to be clear, consistent and true to what we are.