Why do I think the Tories will still win?

According to many commentators we are likely to have a hung Parliament after the election. Others point to a small Tory majority, but I believe the majority will be significant although not a landslide. Why though?

When the election is called, possibly on May 5th although I still think there is good chance that it will be early, there will be a bid test for our pollsters. This will be the first general election in which the Tories have started a good chance since 1992. That time the polls got it spectacularly wrong, but each election since has been a foregone conclusion and so many people have not paid much attention to the correlation between polls and outcome since.

I'm an avid reader of PoliticalBetting.com, a website which studies polls very closely. One significant fact is that in all the polls before the general election result in the last three GEs 29 out of 31 of them have overstated the Labour position, so much so that Mike Smithson who owns PoliticalBetting.com has a golden rule:

"The poll which has Labour in the weakest position is the likeliest to be most accurate".

Other tests of polls such as the European Elections have also shown this to be true. Political Betting does have its own pollster Angus Reid, which has consistently been putting the Tories at 40% and Labour at 24%, if that were true it would be a significant difference to the other polls. We'll only find out at the election!

There is a common wisdom that the Tories are not doing as well as Labour did before 1997, that's probably true. In 1997 people were really wanting to believe in new Labour, and because that promise has been broken we're not inclined to believe the promises so readily now.

There are factors which have given Labour an exaggerated position in the polls. I'll quickly go over these, firstly there is a well known fact that Labour voters are less likely to turn out than Tory voters, add in the fact that Labour is even less popular now and that may be more significant. Secondly, for some reason, people working in the public sector are over represented in the polls than their private sector counterparts, and they are more likely to be Labour voters. Thirdly, in previous elections there was major tactical voting to stop the Tories getting in. The pollsters generally ask questions about how they would like to vote, but there are changes when they are asked to vote 'in their constituency'. There is evidence that the tactical voting factor maybe about to be reversed.

Also, other data points to polls of the marginals (where the change of Government will come from) show a 5% increase in Tory lead over the national position.

From all these factors, the historical data, the overstating of Labour's position and the data from the marginals shows that it is likely again that the polls are going to be out by several percentage points. That's why I think the Tories will still win, and talk of hung parliaments should not come into play until the lead is roughly 4%.

Squiffy.


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