Sadly, I can’t actually find any historical incidents of the Lib Dems getting poll ratings of an asterisk. The lowest the Liberal Democrat party has ever polled seems to be 4% in MORI’s polls between June and August 1989, when their support was being split by the continuing SDP. Looking at their predecessor, the lowest Liberal party score I can find in a poll was 1.5% in a Gallup poll in 1955.

Of course, historical polls from before 1997 or so are tricky to find online – MORI and ICM have their archives up, but it’s trickier to find historical polls from companies who no longer regularly conduct them. It could be that at some point in the distant past the Liberal party really was just an asterisk, but I expect Chris Huhne was just exaggerating a bit. Either way, in the past the Lib Dems have indeed had much lower scores than 12%.

UPDATE: Thanks to David Boothroyd in the comments who has managed to find an ICM poll from the Sunday Correspondent in 1989 that had the Lib Dems at 3% (ICM have their Guardian series on their website back into the 80s, but only have polls for other clients back to 1990). Can anyone beat that?

UPDATE2: There is a System Three poll in Scotland in 1988 that had the Lib Dems at just 2% (see here). A Scotland poll isn’t quite the same thing as a GB one, but what the hell. Rob Blackie in the comments reckons there was a Scottish poll (presumably from a different company) that had them even lower. Can anyone track that one down?

The share of the vote in these seats back in 2005 was CON 36%, LAB 23%, LDEM 35%. In ICM’s poll today they found support at CON 35%(-1), LAB 18%(-5), LDEM 39%(+4). That equates to a swing of 4.5% from Labour to the Lib Dems, and a swing of 2.5% from the Conservatives to the Lib Dems. This isn’t actually very good for them if you compare it to the national polls – the last ICM GB poll was showing the equivalent of a 7.5% swing from Labour to the Lib Dems, and a 3.5% swing from the Conservatives to the Lib Dems – in other words, the Lib Dems are doing worse in their target seats than nationally. On these figures, the Lib Dems would gain 10 seats from the Conservatives, and 11 from Labour.

It gets more interesting though if you look seperately at the Conservative-held LibDem targets, and the Labour-held LibDem targets. As Julian Glover rightly warns in his commentary, only 15 of these seats are Labour held so the sample size isn’t huge and some caution is necessary, but it appears to show that the Lib Dem advance in marginals is wholly concentrated in Labour held ones: taken separately, responses in Con-v-LD seats shows no discernable swing to the Liberal Democrats, but a swing of about 8 points in Lab-v-LD seats. That would result in the Lib Dems taking
about 28 or so seats from Labour, but few if any from the Conservatives. If this finding is at all accurate, it will be key to the result.

The short answer is that it should be. Pollsters in the UK do not weight their samples to match the demographic profile of voters, they weight them to match the demographic profiles of UK adults, so most of those young people who wouldn’t normally have voted should have been represented in the samples anyway. Only Harris specifically ask respondents if they are registered to vote, so they would not have been filtered out of other companies’ samples.

Another point I’ve seen raised is how well pollsters cope with young people who are predominantly online or have only mobile phones. Firstly, online really isn’t a problem, since we have plenty of online pollsters. Secondly, all polls weight by age, so this cannot result in an under-representation of young people. The problem would be if mobile-only young people were significantly different to young people with land lines. If landline penetration continues to fall I suspect that this will eventually be a problem that phone pollsters need to tackle, though there is always the option of including mobile phones in samples.

Perhaps the most common question I’ve seen is whether a change would upset pollsters “assumptions”. Pollsters do not assume particular groups are more or less likely to vote. Instead the majority of pollsters factor in likelihood to vote by asking people how likely they are to vote, and then weighting or filtering appropriately. The correct proportion of young people are already represented in pollsters samples, so if those people told pollsters they had become more likely to vote, it would be picked up.

The bottom line on a lot of questions of whether pollsters would pick up a new trend is that pollsters don’t actually make many presumptions up front about how people will behave. With a few minor and well evidenced exceptions (such as Populus and ICM’s reallocation of don’t knows on the assumption they are likely to vote how they did last time), voting intention figures are based on what people tell pollsters, not the pollsters’ preconceived assumptions.

Things can go always go wrong of course, and I expect it’s more likely to happen at an election where there has been a large shift in support, but I can’t see any particular reason to expect the polls to get it wrong this time.

If we compare the crossbreaks in the two post-debate YouGov polls so far with the averages of the crossbreaks in the three YouGov polls before the Lib Dem manifesto launch, and we compare the ComRes poll with the averages of the crossbreaks in their polls from before the debate, we can get some idea of which groups have swung the most. We need to remember that even combined together these are small sample sizes and they are not internally weighted, so at best this can only give us a broad brush idea of what is going on, but there are some consistent trends.

We can be fairly confident in saying that young people have swung the most strongly towards the Liberal Democrats. In both YouGov’s post-debate polls they have had the Lib Dems in the 40s amongst under-35s, compared to the mid-20s prior to the debate, an average increase of 17 points. ComRes have a similar pattern. The Lib Dem boost amongst under 35s seems to be at least twice that amongst all older voters.

Secondly women may have swung to the Lib Dems more than men (more specifically, there’s been a swing from Conservative to Lib Dem amongst both sexes, but Labour’s vote has fallen much more amongst women). The contrast here is not as large as is it with age though, so I’m less confident this is a genuine pattern.

On social class there is no obvious pattern, YouGov seem to be showing a larger swing amongst C2DEs, but it is the other way round with ComRes. On regional breaks the evidence is also unclear, though both ComRes and YouGov seem to have the Lib Dems making the most progress in the North, and YouGov’s figures are striking for the almost complete lack of a Lib Dem boost in Scotland. On other hand, late respondents to YouGov’s new Scottish poll in the Scotland on Sunday today (whose fieldwork straddled the debate) did show swing towards the Lib Dems.

If you ask people how likely they are to change their voting intention a majority will often say there is some chance of doing so (exactly how much depends on the question). Take for example the PoliticsHome marginals survey – 61% of people said their was some chance of them changing their vote. It’s also worth looking in that poll at what parties those Lib Dem waverers might consider switching to. Of Lib Dem waverers 45% said they would consider voting Labour. Assuming that whatever figures Labour are looking at show roughly the same thing, you can see where they are coming from. If two thirds of Lib Dem voters might consider switching, and half of those might consider voting Labour, there’s your extra five points.

Real life, however, doesn’t work like that. In most cases people saying they might change their vote is a “never say never” answer, people who really are pretty certain of voting a certain way but don’t want to commit themselves totally. In the case of that PoliticsHome poll, the 61% included 33% who said “Unlikely – I may yet change my mind, but I would be surprised if I didn’t end up voting for this party”, people who I think are realistically very unlikely to change.

Polls normally show the Lib Dem vote as being the most “uncertain”, but I suspect this is more a result of the type of person who votes Lib Dem: more likely to see themselves as a floating voter dissatisfied with the big two. Certainly it is a regular finding in polls, but never translates into the Lib Dem vote collapsing at election time (indeed, more often they gain support in election campaigns, though it’s not the given some assume). While Lib Dem voters might claim uncertainty to pollsters, I would be more than surprised if Lib Dem support suddenly dropped by a third over the next 6 months.

It’s also worth pointing out that while that PoliticsHome poll showed 45% of potential Lib Dem waverers might vote Labour, it also showed 33% might vote Tory. If the Lib Dems were horribly squeezed, votes could go both ways.

More interesting is actually the fate of “other” voters. While it seems implausible to expect the Lib Dem vote to drop by 5 points, a drop of three points in support for others from their current high sounds more likely. Whether these voters would shift en masse to Labour seems less likely, especially when it comes to UKIP voters.

I’m sure both Labour and the Conservatives could gather some support from Lib Dem waverers, but 5 points worth is just silly. If Labour are to close the gap with the Conservatives, it’s more likely to be because people switch back from the Tories.

On one front the poll has good news for them. It reveals a very positive party image, more people see them as caring than the other two parties, more people see them understanding the way people live their lives, being honest and principled and sharing people’s values. On other measures like being united, having a good team of leaders and being competent they trail behind the Conservatives, but are ahead of Labour.

Less good, and one reason why the positive image doesn’t translate into more votes, is that 65% of people agreed with the statement that “It doesn’t make any difference what policies the Lib Dems put forward because they have no realistic chance of ever putting them into practice, so ultimately they’ll always be just a protest vote party at national level.”. This included 37% of Lib Dem voters. 32% of people thought that “really strong distinctive policies on important issues, it will have a chance of making a big advance by gaining more MPs at the next election, because neither of the other parties is particularly appealing to most people”.

In considering why such positive perceptions of party aren’t currently translating into more support in the polls, it’s also worth looking back a bit into the past. While these are good figures and in many cases show a large positive shift when compared to the results of the same survey a year ago (particularly in being seen as honest & principled, caring about ordinary people and understanding the way people live their lives) in most cases they are still below the figures the Lib Dems recorded back in 2005 at the end of the Charles Kennedy era – 34% think they have a good team of leaders now, but 52% did in 2005; 50% think they are united now, but 71% did in 2005; 37% think they are competent now, but 46% did in 2005. The Lib Dems have a positive image, but not as positive as it was at the last election.

The presentation includes the results of questions about the effect knowing or thinking (it’s sadly not made clear exactly what the question wording was) that the Lib Dems would form a coalition with David Cameron and the Conservatives or Gordon Brown and Labour would have on people’s likelihood to vote Lib Dem. In both cases just under 4/10 people said it would make no difference.

Overall the figures were not hugely different. 29% of people would be more likely to vote Lib Dem if they were going into coalition with the Tories, 31% less likely. 30% more likely if they were headed into coalition with Labour, 25% less likely.

Broken down by party, unsurprisingly if the Lib Dems allied themselves with Labour Conservative supporters would be drastically less likely to support them – 61% would be less likely, including 38% who would be “much less likely”. There is a mirror image for Labour supporters – 59% of whom would be less likely if the Lib Dems allied themselves with the Tories. No surprises there, though it underlines the importance for the Lib Dems of maintaining a neutral stance, there are plenty of supporters of both other parties who vote tactically for the Lib Dems to keep the other one out, and they can’t afford to alienate half of them.

More interestingly, amongst current Lib Dem supporters attitudes are far more positive towards a Brown alliance than a Cameron one. 34% of current Lib Dem supporters would be more likely to vote for the party if they allied themselves with Brown, with 24% against. Only 23% were more likely to vote for the party if they allied themselves with Cameron, while 34% were against.

An important caveat is that the polling is a year out of date now, so public attitudes towards David Cameron and Gordon Brown have probably changed. The Lib Dem presentation goes on to make the sound point that even if there is a hung Parliament, the decision will probably be made by the Parliamentary arithmatic, but – back in Spring 2007 at least – it looks as though Lib Dem supporters would have been much happier to see their party supporting a Brown government rather than a Cameron one.

In ICM’s poll support for a referendum on the treaty amongst Lib Dems stands at 67%, with 33% opposed. The MORI survey found support for a referendum on EU membership was at 49% amongst Lib Dem voters, though the questions were asked in a very different way so a straight comparison is somewhat unfair.

ICM’s poll suggests only 25% of Lib Dem voters supported the idea that there should be only a one question referendum on EU membership, but 70% would prefer a two-question referendum that asked about both EU membership and the Lisbon treaty.

This appears to be a direct contradiction to the Lib Dem commissioned MORI poll, which amongst Lib Dem voters found 30% wanted a referendum on the treaty, 37% wanted a referendum on membership and 7% wanted both. The reason is the different questions asked, or more specifically, the different prompts people were given.

In ICM’s question Lib Dem voters were asked to chose between a one question referendum on just membership or a two-question referendum on both membership and the treaty. In MORI’s question people were prompted with the options of a referendum on the treaty OR a referendum on membership. While some people said both and MORI dutifully recorded it, it wasn’t actually given as an option, so many people would have assumed that had to give one of the options presented to them and that both was not up for grabs.

It would appear therefore that, while in forced choice between referendums on just the treaty or just EU membership Lib Dem voters would go for the latter, if presented with the chance to have both they’d opt for that.

Of course, this is largely a debate about the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. Why pay so much attention to exactly what type of referendum Liberal Democrat voters would like? Especially since, as I’ve said in the past, questions on referendums nearly always show majority support – “Do you want a vote on this issue, or are you a nitwit who shouldn’t be allowed a say?”. The only real impact is if it has an affect on Lib Dem support. On that question ICM asked Lib Dem voters (or at least, 2005 Lib Dem voters…remember some of these people will already be backing other parties) how they would react if the Liberal Democrats voted against a referendum. 32% said it would make them less likely to vote for the Liberal Democrats next time round (including 10% would said they would definitely not vote Lib Dem), 7% said it would make them more likely to vote Lib Dem.

I am always highly sceptical about questions like this – we don’t know how many of those would not votes are people who wouldn’t vote Lib Dem anyway. Given this is a sample of former Lib Dem voters there shouldn’t be that many such people. The second issue is that people may be susing the question just to register their dislike of the policy and, when push comes to shove, will still vote for their party. Even with those caveats in mind, it does suggest some disquiet amongst Lib Dem supporters. The probability though is that, in reality, Europe isn’t the main thing driving the voting intention of most Lib Dem supporters – something underlined by the last question.

ICM also asked Lib Dem voters what their general attitude towards Europe was. 11% wanted more European integration, 33% supported the status quo, 46% thought Europe should have less power and 10% supported leaving the EU altogether. Obviously it would be more useful if we had the answers from supporters of other parties to put these answers in context, but the balance of opinion seems to be towarsd Euroscepticism, and it does appear that many Lib Dem supporters back the party despite having very different views on Europe.

Asked if people would prefer a referendum on the current EU treaty or membership as a whole, people much prefered a referendum on EU membership (by 38% to 18%, with 10% not wanting a referendum at all, 8% saying they’d like both and 26% don’t know).

Interestingly enough, the least supportive towards the Lib Dem policy were their own voters – they supported a membership referendum over one on just the treaty by only 37% to 30%, and only 49% supported a membership referendum per se, with 42% opposed.

Incidentally, before someone asks it is clear from the crossbreaks provided that a voting intention question was asked. Unfortunately, there are no details of a likelihood of voting question so we cannot extrapolate comparable topline voting intention figures from that. The corssbreak figures work out at Conservative 34%, Labour 44%, Lib Dem 15%, which is within a percentage point of the unfiltered voting intention figures in MORI’s January political monitor.

The only time questions are really asked about them is in Populus’s annual poll for the party conference season, which asks some questions on every party – this year 69% thought the Lib Dems were just a protest vote party, and 68% thought they “seem decent people, but their policies probably don’t really add up”. The polls occassioned by the Lib Dem leadership election underlined why polls don’t have much to say for them – invariably showing that most people didn’t have any opinion whatsoever over whether it should be Huhne or Clegg, and often had no idea who they were.

For the last year the Lib Dems have languished in the polls – though exactly how bad things were differed between pollsters. The level of Liberal Democrat support in the polls is the most variable between the pollsters, while Populus tend to be the most favourable to Labour and ComRes to the Tories the differences aren’t actually that great – everyone had the Tories up around 40% or so, everyone had Labour down to the low 30s. With the Liberal Democrats it’s different, looking at the average of the monthly polls this year from February till November – months when I have comparable figures from 4 pollsters – YouGov had the Lib Dems at 15.2%, Populus at 17%, ComRes at 17.6% and ICM at 19.4% (Ipsos MORI didn’t have their regular monitor for two of these months, but for the record the average in the remaining months was 16.1%). I posted a while back about what I thought some of the reasons might be. In recent months though even ICM have showed them falling to the mid-teens, so while it might be open to debate how bad things got, it’s pretty indisputable that things were bad.

What happened? There is an absence of polling evidence here, so I am afraid what follows is largely my own personal opinion and is far shorter than the other two posts. Having looked at Labour and the Conservatives though, I didn’t want to start the year without also looking at the Lib Dems.

The casuality of the Lib Dems’ poor performance was Sir Menzies Cambpell. To some extent he wasn’t really the problem, at least, he wasn’t a negative for the Liberal Democrats, only the an absence of a positive where they needed one to alleviate a problem that was not their own doing. Polls didn’t show anyone disliking him, and if they did show that people thought he was too old for the job, it probably wasn’t dragging the party down: a Lib Dem leader doesn’t have to be a potential Prime Minister, people know he isn’t going to be one. Ming’s problem was that he didn’t have any impact at all, and he was filling a role that needed to be carried out by someone who did.

In the last post I wrote that the Conservative advance in 2007 was largely down to Labour’s failings, rather than anything they did for themselves. That goes double for the Liberal Democrats. Lib Dems anxiously worrying about ratings and blaming their leader for not doing better should accept that they are not necessarily masters of their own fate – a certain proportion of Lib Dem votes are always going to be negative votes against the two main parties, if the reasons for the protest against the main parties receeds, so will that vote.

A large proportion of people who voted Lib Dem at the last election were people who identify themselves as Labour supporters but who voted Lib Dem either for tactical reasons or in protest over Iraq or something else that Tony Blair has done. While the former may remain, Iraq and Tony Blair as recruiting serjeants for Lib Dem protest votes have faded. Equally, whereas in 2001 and 2005 many people would have wanted to vote against Labour but would have found the Conservatives too toxic to contemplate, as David Cameron improves the Tory image the Liberal Democrats now have to share an anti-Labour vote they would once have been the obvious home for.

One strategy for the Liberal Democrats could be to try to hold back the tide, reblacken the Tory name or fight to keep Brown linked to Iraq and the Blair government. More realistically though they need to adapt to the changed circumstances. Their positioning at the last election was perfectly in tune with the political environment of the time – an unpopular government with an opposition that was distrusted – the Lib Dem slogan was “the Real Alternative”, a narrative that was values and mission free, it didn’t involve standing for anything, just not being the other two parties. It worked well for them and meant they could win on both fronts. With a detoxified Tory party it won’t chime in the same way, not least because in a more competitive election the very real alternative to a Brown government will be a Cameron one.

To prevent themselves being squeezed the Liberal Democrats need to present a new narrative that tells people what their purpose is, they need to differentiate themselves far more clearly as standing for something distinct from the other two parties. Rather than claiming to be the “real alternative”, they need to paint a coherent picture of what a “liberal alternative” is, so they can build more of a positive vote for them, making up for the inevitable loss of some of the negative vote they got last time round. Nick Clegg’s initial comments after being elected leader about Britain being a Liberal country that doesn’t yet vote Liberal perhaps points towards this sort of strategy – a view that while there are people who would vote for liberal politics, the Liberal Democrats haven’t necessarily managed to clearly identify themselves with it in people’s minds.

Nick Clegg appears to be a far more media-savvy and charismatic leader than Ming Campbell. Just by being leader he isn’t going to suddenly make the political environment any friendlier for the Liberal Democrat party, there are tough market conditions out there for them, but he does at least have the potential to be better at keeping them in the public eye and that alone would improve things somewhat. Putting forward a coherent and distinct narrative that gives people a really positive reason to vote Liberal Democrat, rather than them just being the nice people who aren’t one of the other two, will be harder – the other parties will copy popular policies and say ‘me too’ to popular values – but that’s what the Lib Dems need to do to avoid being sidelined in the first really competitive election since 1992.