Last week’s column showed trends in voting intentions for the three major parties during the 2005 election campaign.
This week shows trends in voting intentions from April 5, the day after the election was announced, to April 13 in the current election campaign. This is poll-of-polls data calculated from 20 different opinion polls involving more than 20,000 interviews during the present campaign.
In 2005 we observed Labour moving ahead of the Conservatives in the polls after about nine days, and their lead stayed roughly in place until the end of the campaign.
Of course, no two election campaigns are the same and it is already clear that this one is taking a rather different trajectory to that of 2005. It looks like the Conservatives are slowly losing ground, Labour support is fluctuating up and down without any discernible trends, and the Liberal Democrats are gradually gaining ground.
It should be stressed that these movements are quite modest, and they have difficulty taking into account the impact of the launch of the party election manifestoes, since the series ends in the middle of the launch period. It will be much easier to see the impact of the manifestoes, along with that of the first leader’s debate, in next week’s set of polls.
But the evidence so far suggests that the Conservatives are no nearer achieving an outright victory in the election than they were at the start, and they may even be further away from it.
