7 things we know about the Lib Dems, and 2 things we don’t
Welcome to the 117th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP) which indulges myself / digs into a somewhat neglected niche of talking about what the polls and related numbers tell us about the Liberal Democrats and the general election.
Although media coverage has been happy to give fair mention of the party’s best result for a century, it’s fair to say that most analysis (with some exceptions) very quickly pivots to talk of other aspects of the result, such as the Reform vote. Indeed, if you didn’t know the election result and was only reading discussions of the Conservative leadership race, you might easily conclude that they had just lost dozen of seats to Reform rather than the Lib Dems.
Then it’s a summary of the final pre-election polls from everyone followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis. (If you’re a free subscriber, sign up for a free trial here to see what you’re missing.)
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7 things we know about the Lib Dems, and 2 things we don’t
1. Why people voted Lib Dem
More in Common tell us:1
Or to caricature: health, bar charts and local candidates pointing at things.
The prominence of tactical voting as a motivation likely helps explain the uptick of Lib Dem support as voting neared with - on Lord Ashcroft’s figures - 44% of Lib Dem voters deciding they were going to vote Lib Dem either on polling day (or the day their postal ballot arrived) or a few days before. That compares to 36% of voters overall. (SNP and Labour voters were those most likely to have decided earlier.)
That the Lib Dem vote appeal was heavily based on the issue at the top of voter concerns, may seem unexceptional. Perhaps it should be too. Though there are two reasons to think it worthy of attention.
One is the contrast with the Conservatives, who did not major on the NHS in anything like the same way. They didn’t trumpet a plan for fixing the NHS. Nor even try to scare people about, say, a Labour government and the health sector trade unions. Rather, they ran a campaign that meant when I checked their website a few times during the campaign there was no mention of the NHS readily available on their front page or in their top stories.
The other reason is that this isn’t a focus the Lib Dems have made before. Harking back for example to the days when Lib Dem campaign messages were summarised by acronyms (a clue perhaps that they had too many parts to them if they needed an acronym), the H in CHEESE was for health, but only one of the six items. And you don’t have to remember what the Five Es were to spot that health wasn’t one of those.
But starting first with then MPs such as Norman Lamb making a particular focus on mental health and now in this Parliament the party concentrating on social care and the NHS more generally, there has been a significant change in what the party talks about.
Focusing in on the top public issue, helped by having a leader with a powerful backstory related to it, seems to have worked well.
2. An efficient vote share, helped by tactical voting
I believe this is known as targeting…
But it’s about more than just targeting. It’s also about the high levels of tactical voting, which both helped the Lib Dems win more seats and which also reduced the Lib Dem votes in some other seats where the anti-Conservative choice was another party.
It’s also about a campaign strategy for a party that, having seen high vote shares not turn into seats before (hello, 1983)2, very deliberately targeted seat numbers instead in a way that went well beyond previous targeting operations.
3. Lib Dems won with high vote shares
Let’s dig into that a bit further by looking at the vote shares secured by Liberal Democrat MPs.
Speaking in a Q+A session at a British Polling Council event near the start of the election, John Curtice was pretty down on Lib Dem prospects. Some of this was the view that’s been debated during the last Parliament about whether the party was, in his view, making a strategic mistake in whose support it was pitching for and the policies being put forward to achieve that.
But he also made a new point that even if the Lib Dems went on to get a good election result, it would be on the basis of MPs with low vote shares, and so leave the party – to use his analogy – up a creek without a paddle. We’ve seen a version of this argument also deployed over Labour – sure you won a huge landslide but look at your vote share… and I’ve also seen a few people knock the Lib Dem performance as being wins gifted to the party by Reform splitting the Conservative vote.
So what does the data now tell us about Lib Dem MPs? Handily Patrick Dunleavy has crunched these numbers:
In fact, of the three largest parties, the Lib Dems have the highest proportion of MPs elected with over 50% of the vote and the lowest proportion elected with under 40%. (It’s also worth noting how well Labour does on these measures too, which is Patrick’s main point. Perhaps that Labour majority isn’t quite so brittle as its overall national vote share might imply?)
4. How the Lib Dem voter coalition varied
An important insight from Owen Winter:
This needs more digging into to explain, though I suspect part of this is about the legacy of an earlier pattern of more working class support stretching decades back in the Celtic Fringe, giving the Liberals and successors a foothold in places where they, rather than Labour, established themselves as the voice of such voters.
5. The leader’s debut on the national stage
If you are interested enough in politics to be reading this, the chances are you think of the idea of the general election being Ed Davey’s debut in national politics as a bit odd. He had been leader for several years and previously a Cabinet minister.
But for most members of the public, who don’t follow politics that closely, the general election was the first time they paid much attention to him. It was in effect his chance to make a first impression.
Here is how the polls tell us that went during the campaign and in the first post-election poll:
The number of don’t know for Ed Davey also halved, so both his profile went up and his reputation improved as it did so.
As ever the caveat applies that other pollsters with other question wording for leader approval type questions get noticeably different numbers. But the trends are the same, such as with BMG who also had weekly approval figures in the campaign.
6. How people rated the campaigns
As I explained during the campaign, I prefer to look at the public’s evaluation of a party’s campaign rebased to take into account the level of support for a party. 38% of people rating a campaign highly for a party riding at 47% in the polls is rather less impressive than 27% doing so for a party on 4%.
Here’s how that way of looking things panned out:
That is a good performance for the Green campaign too, and notable how issues such as Farage’s comments on Putin and his candidate problems do seem to have hit evaluations of his campaign.3
7. How the party’s standing fared
Perhaps the main story of the Ipsos net party favourability scores through the last Parliament is that long decline in the Conservative ratings, under all three of Johnson, Truss and Sunak.
For the Liberal Democrats, you can see the impact of first, successful elections during the Parliament, and then most recently the general election campaign.
Previous boosts have tended to fade so it will be interesting to see later in the year how that crowded Labour, Green, Lib Dem top of the charts settles down.
8. & 9. Two things we don’t (yet) know
We don’t know if Lib Dem vote support was higher or lower the older a voter was. YouGov and Focaldata tell the opposite picture: the former has Lib Dem support being highest among the youngest voters but the latter has Lib Dem support being highest among the oldest voters.
Likewise, we don’t know if the Lib Dems did well compared to past elections at retaining support from among those who voted for them at the previous general election or not. I wrote last week of: “the contrast between Lord Ashcroft’s data showing the Lib Dems retained only 49% of their 2019 voters, a worse retention rate than the Conservatives, with Focaldata’s data showing the Lib Dems retained 66% of their 2019 voters (a high figure by the party’s historical standards, even compared with Charles Kennedy’s time), and well ahead of the Conservatives.”
Both will be important things for the party to understand. But beware anyone touting lessons so far given the contradictory evidence currently available.
National voting intention polls
Here is where things ended up with the final published poll from each pollster before the general election. (There are no voting intention polls out, yet. Come on pollsters, get a shift on please.)
For more details and updates through the week, see my daily updated table here and for all the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Last week’s edition
How did the pollsters do at the general election?
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