Lord Ashcroft Polls

By Lord Ashcroft

This article was first published in the Financial Times

There is a ritual, and even a specialised vocabulary, for midterm local elections in the UK. In advance, they are always a “crucial test” of the government’s popularity, and the opposition’s ability to turn poll ratings into votes. Next comes expectation management, when incumbent parties brief that they will lose practically all their councillors, and the challengers claim they expect to gain hardly any, in the forlorn hope of bamboozling political reporters.

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By Lord Ashcroft

Marginal constituencies decide the outcome of elections. In 2010, though the Conservatives did not achieve the national vote share they wanted, the party’s targeting strategy meant it won 23 more Labour seats and 9 more Liberal Democrat seats than it would have done on a uniform swing. Had it not been for the Conservative performance in the marginals, Labour would have been the largest parliament and would have continued in government.

The voters in marginal seats receive, no doubt to their delight, a great deal more attention from the parties than anyone else. But not all marginal seats are the same. Not only are they contested by different parties, they are home to different kinds of people and face a variety of different circumstances. Not only can the state of play in the marginals look rather different from the national polls, different kinds of marginal seat can look rather different from each other.

Now that we are past the midway point in the parliament – and now that it’s clear that the constituency boundaries will not be changing before the next election – I decided it was time for a proper look at the marginal territory where it will be decided who enters 10 Downing Street on 8 May 2015 and whether or not they have an overall majority at their command.

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By Lord Ashcroft

In August 2011 I conducted a poll of 41 marginal Conservative-held seats to find out whether the static national polls were hiding a more nuanced picture on this crucial battleground. The results constitute mixed news for the Conservative Party – the findings are more encouraging for Tories where the Liberal Democrats are in second place than in constituencies where Labour are the main opponents.

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