15 for '15 – My pick of fifteen charts for the 2015 general election

Can the Tories win the election?
(10) Focussing on the final months of the parliament, our historical precedents suggest a Conservative lead in the popular vote on election day of between 2 and 8 points. What is less clear (because the historical patterns aren’t quite so tidy) is the actual levels of support for these two parties, and indeed what will happen to the others – in Britain we have no experience of junior coalition partners since before the age of opinon polling, nor is there any real precedent for the UKIP-, SNP- or Green surges.
2014 UK European elections
(11) But it’s primarily the red-blue battleground where elections are decided. As if to illustrate with striking clarity the point in the previous chart, the 2014 European election campaign saw the Labour-Conservative spread narrow from 10 points in February to 1.5 points on the day (though as mentioned earlier, this time it was for second place behind UKIP).
Do constituency boundaries favour Labour in 2015?
(12) No, I haven’t just extended the historical results with a dotted line. As I wrote in December, the skew has a great many moving parts (among which, contrary to popular belief, boundaries favourable to Labour are a relatively minor factor) but to summarise, the Labour collapse in Scotland and the better performance of the Tories in the marginals, relative to other English and Welsh seats, are likely to have removed the so-called ‘bias’ in Labour’s favour. The wedge (the sector of the swingometer representing a hung parliament) has widened back to the 15 or so points it stood at in 2010 – my best guess is that the Conservatives and Labour would both now need a 7 or 8 point lead to win an overall majority (although this is very much subject to change).

(Continued…)





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