Crashing each other’s parties
PoliticalBetting.com has some interesting coverage of the details of today’s YouGov poll for the Evening Standard, which again shows an extraordinary lead for Boris. They have him on 49%, to Ken’s 36% and Brian’s 10%.
Particularly interesting are the figures around the one singled out by YouGov’s Peter Kellner in response to criticism – or at least questioning – of his methods. Kellner says:
To my mind, the key fact in this campaign so far is that around one-in-five people who “generally speaking” think of themselves as Labour say they would vote for Boris Johnson. If Livingstone can get most of this group to return to the fold (plus do better on second preferences), he might still win; if he can’t, he loses.
The figures showing how people seeing themselves as generally supporting a particular political party intend to vote are indeed interesting.
What we can see from them are how Boris is doing so well: he’s somehow managed to lure over people who usually support other parties to vote for him instead.
Of course, most Conservatives (86%) intend to vote for him. The 14% who don’t are of course the only ones who have realised what a dangerous idea for their party making Boris their most powerful representative in the country is, and we can only hope that between now and 1 May some more of the 86% majority will see the light too!
Perhaps more surprising is that a fairly large 22% of people who normally support Labour intend to vote for Boris. Quite why anyone of a left-wing persuasion would want to support a nasty, selfish right-winger who’s spent the past 20 years pandering to upper-middle-class Daily Telegraph readers’ prejudices through his often offensive regular column is beyond me. Indeed, the idea that anyone who normally supports Labour could possibly think that Boris Johnson will have the first clue about how to address their social justice priorities would be laughable, were the danger of our great capital sleepwalking into four long years of an incompetent Boris Mayoralty not so threatening.
The final column of these figures is especially interesting, and must be bitterly disappointing to Brian Paddick. When asked who they would be voting for, the 114 people who identified themselves as Liberal Democrat supporters answered in the following proportions: Ken 24%, Brian 31%, Boris 40%. One third more Liberal Democrats intend to vote for Boris than for Brian.
Again, I’m rather at a loss to explain this. From what I’ve seen of Brian’s pronouncements, he hasn’t done anything to alienate the more right-leaning side of his party: opposing the £25 CO2 charge using rhetoric about it penalising ‘family cars’, for instance, should have easily kept them on board, I would have thought. So is it the moderate Lib Dems, or the left-leaning Lib Dems who are abandoning their own candidate and turning to Boris? Brian seems competent and articulate; why desert him for a bumbling buffoon who would make London a laughing stock?
What seems clear from these figures, assuming they are broadly accurate, is that Boris is the only main candidate who is currently managing to keep nearly all his party’s supporters on side. Both Ken, and to an even more alarming extent Brian, are seeing some of their own parties’ supporters crashing other parties, particularly Boris’s.
So if you know anyone who you think you can rely on to vote Labour or Liberal Democrat, and therefore haven’t bothered mentioning StopBoris.org to them, or checking they’ve registered to vote, there’s no time like the present to get them on board.
If Boris is elected Mayor on 1 May, the people who’ve crashed his party will find themselves waking up the morning after with a terrible hangover, wondering why they ever left their own party behind as they look on in horror at the four-year-long fallout of the night before. We need to get people to reach that realisation as soon as possible now, so that they return safely to their own parties before the election!
April 8th, 2008 at 08.26
Presuming this poll is in any way accurate (and, to my knowledge, no other poll has given Boris such a big lead) is this another example of people voting local in protest against Government policies such as ID Cards and the Iraq War? The question that we may not see an answer to until polling day is whether Ken has done enough work over the last few years to show that he is a Labour politician but not that kind of Labour supporter and thereby insulating him from the toxic effects of the Labour brand. The more he can persuade Government ministers not to talk about him the better.
April 8th, 2008 at 11.32
You could be right, Loz. If so, more of those ‘Londoners for peace’ events with Ken appearing with his arm round Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn et al should help. Ken was dead against the war from day one, so it would be silly for him to suffer because of the New Labour’s foolishness (especially since Boris was fanatically supportive of it)
Still there are however, other areas that Ken’s campaign need to work on, like the worrying amount of LibDem support going to the Tories when they should be going Labour!!! How they’re going to deal with that one, I don’t have a clue.