My favourite general election quote of the day

From a senior Lib Dem campaign source:

We’re talking here about offering our services to the Labour Party as we’re the ones with the experience of fighting general elections when you’re in third.

The more serious point is that many people, even inside the Liberal Democrats, have consistently under-estimated just how large scale the party’s targeting efforts are for the 2010 general election.

It would be wrong of me to publicise information I know from working for the party until last year, but it’s safe to say that:

1. It’s massively bigger than previous targeting efforts – so much so that during this Parliament the traditional residential training weekends have had to be split into several back-to-back weekends because the venue could not cope, and
2. The reach of the targeting effort is much broader than you would expect from looking at the betting markets.

The implication of this though is that even with the party’s current surge in the opinion polls, delivering all the targeted seats would produce a fantastic result – and so I hope people will continue to respond to the requests to go and help in them. A surge in votes does not necessarily produce a surge in seats – but support the massive targeting efforts and there can be a surge in seats even if the current surge in votes subsides.