Will ICM add to the jitters within the Lib Dems?
August 3rd, 2008
The firm’s 16% is the lowest since Clegg became leader
The most significant news in a new ICM poll in the Sunday Express is that the Lib Dems have slumped to their lowest ratings from the firm since well before Nick Clegg became leader last December. The shares with changes on the last survey from the pollster nearly a fortnight ago are: CON 45% (+2): LAB 29% (+1): LD 16% (-3)
This is a particular blow for the party because ICM’s methodology is generally more favourable to the Lib Dems than any of the other firms - so a drop of this scale could add further to the unease in the party following the disappointing by election performances in Crewe & Nantwich, Henley and Glasgow East.
Also the 16% is not much better than the 14% that ICM had at the start of October 2007 just before Ming announced that he was going.
This is, of course, the holiday season and odd results can emerge. But Nick Clegg will be really hoping to see better figures than this from the firm by the time of his party conference in mid-September.
The Lib Dems are suffering because they have been more squeezed out of the news agenda than usual as all the political focus has been on the Labour leadership.
Also in the poll are inconclusive findings on whether Labour would be better or worse off if they changed their leader.
Paul Maggs should be following with his Sunday newspaper review later.
Mike Smithson
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It’s going to Charlie boy’s ‘turn’ again soon the way this is going! On a serious note I believe they could do far worse.
Problems and all, he had a certain charm and charisma desperately lacking in Ming, Clegg or anyone else waiting in the wings.
I hope that Cable holds on (I wish he was our shadow Treasurer actually) but think most sitting LDs in the SE are toast.
Government funded propaganda masquerading as documentaries:
“The Government has spent almost £2 million to fund programmes that are all but indistinguishable from regular shows, The Sunday Telegraph has established.
But unlike normal documentaries, the programmes are commissioned by ministers with the purpose of showing their policies or activities in a sympathetic light.
The media watchdog Ofcom has disclosed that it had opened an investigation into one of the programmes, Beat: Life on the Street — about the Government’s controversial Police Community Support Officers, to see whether it breached its broadcasting code. “
Was Obama’s Bounce a Bubble? : Michael Barone
“The first bit of evidence comes from the July 10–13 ABC/Washington Post poll. It asked registered voters if they were “certain” to vote. Only 46 percent of voters under 30 said they were — substantially lower than the 66 percent who said so in the ABC/Washington Post poll taken Feb. 28–March 2, at a time when Obama was enjoying a string of primary and caucus victories and before the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright were circulated on youtube.com on March 13. The 46 percent of young voters who said in July they were certain to vote was far lower than the 79 percent of 65-and-over voters who said the same.
The second bit of evidence comes from the Gallup/USAToday poll taken July 25-27. This poll showed that when you narrowed the base of respondents down from registered voters to likely voters, John McCain was ahead 49 percent to 45 percent.”
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmEzNzk5NDM2NmQzYTc1NGMwNjRhODdlYzJhMWFlNDQ=
Obama thinking; McCain feeling
“In the many, many years that I’ve been in Washington, John McCain is far and away the most emotional politician I have ever met. McCain is all emotion. People don’t understand that, so they keep talking about his temperament, his temper. He reacts emotionally, therefore unpredictably.”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/08/mccain_and_obama_different_kin.html
3. I expect that is why Obama has now switched his opposition to drilling and supported it (with the caveat that it be a part of a broader strategy, of course, but that is also McCain’s policy). In particular, polls showed Floridians are now in favour of off-shore drilling.
I read it suggested that the Democratic leadership was blocking the ‘gang of ten’ compromise on drilling because Obama’s position against drilling would have put him to the left of the Democratic party on the issue if the deal was successful. Now that Obama’s opposition to drilling has been reversed, how long before the compromise is accepted? Obama’s statement on his new position explicitly references the deal as something he supports:
http://www.qurl.com/krn27
I honest;y can’t remember the last time on television.l However this could simply presage a returm to the days when they considerably outpolled the polls at GEs when the coverage increased By law
* last time i saw a Lib dem on television
The Lib Dems doing badly is Brown’s saviour. If Clegg was doing better, the Lib Dems could pick up disaffected Labour voters and push the government into third place. Although the electoral maths would prevent it, the idea of Cameron becoming PM and Nick Clegg become leader of the opposition would push the PLP to remove Brown.
That the Lib Dems have not benefitted one iota from Labour’s freefall is a big problem for them - if they can’t prosper now, then when can they? I seem to recall it was the same in 94-97. Their poll ratings barely benefitted from Major’s freefall.
The point about voting for the Lib Dems is not about a choice of government, but about a vote of protest - ie by-elections (in the days when they used to win them!) or anti-Iraq war in 01 and 05.
Then again, national opinion poll ratings are often dislocated from how well they do on the ground - their vote can go down, whilst their seats go up.
Clegg is pretty dire, but has done one thing better than Ming - the 50 red target seats decision. If the Lib Dems are ever to have a chance of challenging for government again, then it has to be after replacing one of the other two parties. The only realstic chance of this is as the party of the left in the usual left:right dichotomy. They should be going for Labour’s jugular with all the vim and vigour they can muster.
I think Clegg gets this to a degree, but can his party overcome their visceral hatred of the Tories to follow thorugh on a longer term strategy? I’m not so sure…
Poor Cleggover. He’s actually asked some decent questions at the last few PMQs.
It won’t do too much for Labour either. Still, be nice for them to be ‘only’ 16pts behind.
Sunday papers thread now up.
Thanks
Double Carpet
BREAKING WIND NEWS **** BREAKING WIND NEWS **** BREAKING WIND NEWS
The breaking news is that WIND is reporting to JNN the contents of a new ARSE poll of polls that comprises ICM, Populus, YouGov, CR and MORI that gives :
Con 45% .. Lab 26.6% .. LibDem 16.8% .. Others 11.6%
The PISSED Wells/Baxter Index with added SOAMES weighting shows :
Con 395 seats .. Lab 175 .. LibDem 44 .. Others 36.
Con majority of 140.
……………………..
Sources :
WIND ….. Whimsical Independent News Division.
JNN ………..Jacobite News Network.
ARSE ….. Anonymous Random Selection of Electors.
PISSED … Political Intelligence Seat Selector Election Determinator
SOAMES …System Of Amending Measured Election Scores
Is it me or is Nick Clegg getting a bit tubby these days
Rob @ 13 - I haven’t seen you, so difficult to answer that question!
Liberal Democrats. They are dying slowly, their membership is old, many are in a generation gap, they are not able to garnish constant publicity. “Others”, have almost as many if not more support than they and to put it mildly the party is in a time warp, and somewhat in the shit, (excuse the word but I think it is apt).
They need publicity, publicity, publicity, but really they are reaping the whirlwind of standing still and not acting or moving forwrad at critical times, the Scottish debacle and inability to move their positon after the Scottish Parliamentary Election result last year is a typical example.
It’s game over for the Lib Dems for a few years. They prospered as an anti-Tory party in the 1990s and early 2000s, but as a result have become closely linked to Labour - and the issues which offered a dividing line with Labour e.g. Iraq and student fees have gone away.
It’s now a question of fighting a rearguard action and salvaging what they can, so that they will have some sort of base from which they might be able to advance again 5-6 years from now.
It’s not game over, its that they have to play a different game and they are not, really I do not think they know how to.
They need a revolution in their approach. One thing they could have done or should be doing now for example, is not going on holiday!
What an opportunity, they could have stayed at home, Clegg could have issued statement after statement, some radical policies, got on the media each day, instead nothing.
Their approach is summed up by Haltemprice and Howden, do nothing.
If you do nothing you quite rightly get nothing in return.
16. I agree to a great extent - they have settled into a pattern of behaviour based on their previous run of success and don’t seem to understand how much things have changed and thus how much their approach needs to adapt.
But I think they would be facing an uphill struggle regardless of that as the tide is flowing so strongly against them - their shortsightedness just makes it even worse.
Oh Dear.
The first thread in yonks concerning the LibDems and it dies a death after 13 comments.
Would their poll ratings climb ‘if only they got the political coverage’? maybe, however, it’s not just the MSN that virtually ignores them, even diehard supporters here rarely mention them or their policies, Jack W obsesses over Obama and his own ARSE, Mr Senior over the Tories ditto Mr Carp to a lesser extent and Mike S (to his credit) remains impartial and detached. Quite honestly from a casual glance, it’s hard to tell who supports the LibDems on here.
If the LibDems want to be heard then have something to say and speak up, don’t leave it all to SBS (a fine fellow) to fight your corner.
Over the past twenty-odd years the Lib/LibDems’ unique selling point has been ‘we are the nice people you can vote for if you don’t want to vote Labour’. That USP has now faded and they’ve got nothing to put in its place. Over the next few years they are likely to revert to the pattern of the sixties and early seventies and become a party largely based on local government activity.
The Lib Dems got votes from people who used to vote Tory, but couldn’t bear to do that from 1992 - 2005, but who would never vote Labour. Sort of, “righty-liberals” if you like.
Unfortunately, those votes elected a load of “lefty-liberals” because they had been chosen by the activists who are all lefty-liberals, with a few, but a very few, exceptions.
Now it is OK to vote Tory again because they are led by a decent, righty-liberal sort of bloke and as a consequence we’re back in a straight fight between Labour and the Tories, the Lib-Dems are facing a classic third party squeeze.
Sorry guys, but Nick Clegg should never have said, “not more than 30″. It is a phrase which will com eback to haunt him as he loses big time to the Tories in the South and hasn’t got the core support to overtake Labour in the North.
20. Certainly it’s possible that a big gap will open up between their GE and local performances - this already exists in many areas, I would expect it to spread significantly further.
20. There’s still a gap for the Lib Dems, and one they’re more or less sat in at the moment, which is combination of centre-left economics with a libertarian approach to social issues. The problem is how to get the message across that (a) they [believe they / appear to] care more about the fate of the poor than the Tories and (b) will get the government out of the public’s face, unlike Labour. But they also need something else. If their policies are just a different mix of those of the main two, there’s no distinctive message, just a distinctive combination (and constitutional reform doesn’t count as the subject’s too dry). The Iraq issue was a Godsend for them, but it’s difficult now there’s nothing attractive they can easily make their own.
To a large extent, it comes down to a question of credibility and relevance. When the fight is clearly between the government and the resurgent Conservatives, what is the point of asking what the Lib Dems think? As Alex rightly asks, when was the last time you saw a Lib Dem?
I still think the best long term bet for them is to be the centre-left opposition to Labour. This may seem to run contrary to the interests of many of their MPs, who hold seats taken from Conservatives, but is that really the case? Targetting Labour will reassure some Tory/LD floating voters who might be thinking of switching to the Conservatives, and their policy platform should be sufficient to keep much of their current coalition on-board.
For the first time in a generation, the Lib Dems have a slim chance of breaking back into the bigtime. If they aspire to be a party of government, they need to either get PR enacted, or replace one of the two main parties. As the natural balancing mechanisms of politics means there should always be one main centre-left and one main centre-right party under FPTP, and the SDP intake means the Lib Dems will be centre-left there’s only one realistic option. The alternative - perhaps more comfortable - is to forego any long-term strategy, accept their place in the second rank, and fight each election on a local basis. But then that brings us back to the question of what the point is of a party that is neither a single-issue protest vote, or a party of government, when one or both main parties are seen as centrist and competant?
Two other comments on the poll.
This is Labour’s best score with ICM since April, which should provide some cheer in what’s been a few pretty cheerless months.
Of the last 19 polls from all companies, all but two have put the Conservatives in a 43-47% ‘box’, with one outside either way (a 41 and a 49).
15. Membership old? Where do you get that from? Our party members are typically ‘younger’ (not necessarily young!) than the other two parties.
Talk of the death or slow demise of the Lib Dems is ridiculous.
Political fortunes can change swiftly (as we saw with the Brown election that never was)
25
What was the point of getting rid of Ming?Clegg’s performance is awful,particularly at a time when an alternative left of centre party should be hoovering up support.
25 Chris, well you confirm the complacent stand still attitude of the party, it needs a highly active, vocal presence, media grabbing issues, anything to get news and recognition.
One of the reasons why there was such a dramatic fall in the numbers voting in the last leadership election is probably death of members who are not being replaced.
It is about much more than the Leader, for all I know he may be doing what I would like to see but hitting a party establishment brick wall. Who knows.
Nick Clegg is like Neil Kinnock
When the LDs had a chance to do something genuinely demoratic like stop Britain’s ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, they went through hoops of embarrassment to ensure that the vote promised to Britons was not permitted when the moment came.
They can not claim to be democratic, that is clear.
As for liberal, they support human rights legislation and all its works to the nth degree, and their party leader is a self-obsessed child who thinks people care how many women he has shagged.
The only puzzle to my mind is why the LDs expect anyone to be interested in voting for them at all. They are a denial of democracy and sensible decision taking, at every turn.
The Lib Dems made a bad mistake by not choosing Huhne. By choosing Cameron ‘lite’ they are struggling to be heard, and unable to distinguish themselves from the Cameroons. Huhne has an unpleasant edge, but that is actually helpful for a third party! He would also have been much better placed to rip flesh from the Labour carcass - which Clegg has belatedly realised is the key to the next GE for the Lib Dems.
The LibDem ability to target byelections even from third place seems to have gone after Glasgow East. Their campaign machine was steam rollered and they went fron 12 per cent to 3 per cent. It is no surprise that their polling numbers are falling. In Scotland they have lost their leader and there seems little interest in the contest for a replacement all the media attention is on Labour’s contest but the demise of the LibDems in Scotland is just as interesting as Labour’s woes. A number of their Westminster seats in Scotland will be vulnerable in 2010.
31. The Lib Dem by-election machine has been misfiring for a good deal longer than since Glasgow East (where to be fair, they never stood much chance, though their performance was still poor when measured against the Conservatives)
The Lib Dems have not won any of the last eight by-elections. You have to go back to 2000-3 to find a similar barren run, and back to 1987-90 to find a longer run (12 between Truro and Eastbourne). It is now over eight years since the last Lib Dem gain from the Conservatives.
I used to support the Lib Dems, but I realised they don’t stand for anything any more so at the next election I might not vote for anyone - I’d never vote SNP, Tory or Labour though.
The Lib Dems used to be a liberal party so as a liberal I voted for them.
The problem with the Lib Dems now is there is such a big difference between what they claim to be and what their leaders do. Right now they’re calling for more, ‘tougher’ and ‘targeted’ stop and searches, hardly liberal. Their policy on prostitution is supposed to be legalise it - yet in the Scottish Parliament they recently voted to make kerb crawling a criminal offence and made the tolerance zones legally unsustainable - hardly a step towards liberalising the law and legalising prostitution is it? When Gordon Brown decided to revert back to classifying cannabis as a class B drug against expert advice in an attempt at triangulation on the Tories (a big mistake) I hardly heard a lot of protest from the Lib Dems, a real liberal party would have objected loudly and called for legalisation or decriminalisation, I didn’t hear it.
Nope the Lib Dems aren’t liberal any more and don’t stand for anything. Nick Clegg just seems like a pro-euro Tory and a bit of a light weight really.
Well, Cameron is having a great holiday right in Lib Dem heartland!