December Polling - Tories in Trouble?

Those with a phobia of statistics should look away now!

There's been a bit of talk about the possibility of a hung parliament in recent weeks. It stems from a few polls this month which show the Conservative lead down to single figures, whilst others show leads for the Tories in the high teens.

Does this show that the Tories are getting into trouble and might fail to get a majority at the next election?

Are Labour really on the road back to government?

Do the Liberal Democrats seriously believe anyone cares what they think?

I thought I'd take a closer look at this months polls to find out! Here are the polls from the month of December (source: UK Polling Report);

	Survey End Date	CON (%)	LAB (%)	LDEM (%)	Con Lead
YouGov/People	2009-12-18	40	28	18	12
Angus Reid/PoliticalBetting	2009-12-18	40	24	20	16
ICM/Guardian	2009-12-13	40	31	18	9
YouGov/Sunday Times	2009-12-11	40	31	16	9
BPIX/Mail on Sunday	2009-12-11	41	30	17	11
ComRes/Independent on Sunday	2009-12-10	41	24	21	17
Angus Reid/PoliticalBetting	2009-12-10	40	23	19	17
Populus/Times	2009-12-06	38	30	20	8
YouGov/Sunday Times	2009-12-04	40	27	18	13
ICM/Sunday Telegraph	2009-12-03	40	29	19	11

As you can see, the Conservative leads vary wildly from 8 to 17 percentage points, but this isn't due to huge differences in the reported Conservative support - it's held steady at 40% - instead the Labour and Lib Dem support hasn't been at all consistent. I think the first thing we can safely assume from these figures is that the Conservatives aren't losing (or gaining) voters.

On the other hand we don't know what's happening with Labour. They've had support reported as low as 23 and as high as 31, but this also broadly corresponds to a similar change in Lib Dem support where when the Labour numbers go up, the Lib Dems are down, and visa versa. This could be down to the methodology of the polling companies, but the polling has been so volatile that I think there has to be something else to explain it.

On the face of it, there's a lot of people who would usually vote Labour that are thinking of voting for the Lib Dems, perhaps as a protest vote, or perhaps because they want to keep the Tories out and are voting tactically, but they weren't sure and still might vote Labour out of principle; when asked by the pollsters who they would vote for, they might give the answer they felt like at the time. If that was the case, however, we probably would've seen these jumps going on for months.

There has also been a steady rise in the mean Labour support over the last quarter from mid 20s to high 20s. This would indicate a few more voters coming back to Labour, probably because they've stopped squabbling over whether they should remove Gordon Brown as leader. However, this time last year the same thing happened, Labour steadily gained on the run up to Christmas, but bombed again in the new year. This year the same might happen, but the difference is they're starting a further 6 points behind.

As it stands, the Conservatives haven't got too much to worry about. The polling average gives them a majority of around 50 seats, a good comfortable majority to govern with. Clearly the next few months are crucial, but Christmas can be enjoyed by the Tories in the knowledge that they have the head start in the new year.

JR