Polls during the campaign also consistently suggested that Lib Dem support was softer: those saying that they were going to vote Lib Dem were also consistently more likely than Labour or Conservative voters to say that they had not definitely decided and may end up voting differently. The implication of these findings was that the election result was always likely to be worse for the Lib Dems than the mid-campaign polls implied. But voting polls are heavily modelled these days, applying adjustments intended to project what the result will look like, not just present a snapshot of responses. This means that by the end of the campaign the polls ought to have reflected the underlying softness in Lib Dem support in a lower vote share, and that did not happen. Furthermore all the opinion polls overstated support for the Lib Dems: if the polls overall were performing properly they should have scattered either side of the result, with some understating Lib Dem support, and that did not happen either.
There is some evidence that the swing away from the Lib Dems mainly occurred in the final 24 hours, too late to be properly reflected in the final pre-election polls. The Times poll published on election day, for example, put support for the Conservatives on 37 per cent (which is what they got), Labour on 28 per cent (they got 30 per cent) and Lib Dems on 27 per cent (they got 23.5 per cent). Fieldwork for this poll was done on the Tuesday and Wednesday before the election and the two halves of the sample produced revealingly different results. The 1,500 interviews conducted on Tuesday, May 4, would, if presented separately, have shown the Conservatives on 35 per cent, Labour on 26 per cent and Lib Dems on 29 per cent. But among the 1,000 people interviewed on Wednesday, May 5, the Conservatives were on 38 per cent, Labour on 30 per cent and the Lib Dems on 24 per cent. Conducting fieldwork over a longer timeframe – two or three days, rather than one – generally improves the chances of a poll sample being properly representative, capturing the views of busy and harder-to-reach voters. In this case it may have helped to obscure a very late swing away from the Lib Dems, principally to Labour.
It was not all bad news for the pollsters. All but one of the nine organisations that produced a poll on electioneve came within 2 per cent of the Conservative share, five were within 1 per cent and two got it exactly right. All but two of the final polls came within 2 per cent of the Labour share and two were within 1 per cent. Overall it was not as good a performance as 2005, when the polls as a whole were more accurate than ever before, but it was better than at many other elections.
A tremor that changed the political landscape
Peter Riddell
Chief Political
Commentator
The general election of May 6, 2010 was one of the most enthralling and exciting in living memory. Yet the dramas of the televised leaders’ debates and of the negotiations leading to the creation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government have tended to obscure the big changes in voting patterns.
Although the Conservatives failed to secure an overall Commons majority, they still gained 100 seats and one of the largest swings of votes ever recorded. There were big variations in party performance in different parts of the country, and all three main parties both gained and lost seats. In detail, the election was notable for a big increase in turnout of 3.7 points up to 65.1 per cent. This was still well below the levels familiar before 2001 (a range of 71 to 79 per cent between 1955 and 1997) but it partly reversed the sharp decline in 2001, down to 59.4 per cent, with just a small recovery to 61.4 per cent in 2005. The Conservatives boosted their share of the vote by 3.7 points to 36 per cent. With the higher turnout, this gave them nearly 2 million more votes, up to 10.71 million. This was a clear 2 million ahead of Labour, which suffered a decline of nearly 1 million in its vote to 8.6 million. Its share of the vote fell by 6.2 points to 29 per cent, its lowest since 1983.
Many Labour MPs were relieved that the party had not done worse, partly because of fears towards the end of the campaign that it might come third in share of the votes and win only 200 to 220 MPs. Labour also did well in the borough elections in inner London and in district elections in some northern and big cities. But May 6 was still the party’s second worst performance since 1918 and most of its gains achieved since the early 1990s in the Midlands and southern England outside the big cities were reversed.
More than a third of voters, 35 per cent, voted for parties other than the Tories and Labour, the highest proportion since 1918. Conversely, the creation of the coalition means that, together, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats won, at 59 per cent, the highest percentage of the vote for any new government since 1945. The Liberal Democrats managed to raise their vote by nearly 850,000 to 6.83 million, an increase of 1 point to 23 per cent. The Democratic Unionists are now the second largest opposition party, although with just eight MPs after Peter Robinson, their leader and the First Minister, lost his seat to the Alliance party, which gained its first Westminster MP.
The Scottish Nationalists were unchanged on six seats (although they did lose a by-election gain) with Plaid Cymru on three seats. The UK Independence Party did, as usual in general elections, much less well than in the previous European Parliament elections, but boosted its vote by a third to 917,832, an increase of 0.9 points to 3.1 per cent. This partly reflected a rise of 62 in its number of candidates up to 558.
The British National Party, with 220 more candidates, at 339, nearly tripled its vote to 564,000, a rise of 1.2 points to 1.9 per cent. The Greens, who gained their first MP, maintained their vote in absolute terms at 286,000, but had a 0.1 point decline in share to 1 per cent.
The Conservatives always faced an uphill struggle to win an overall Commons majority. Their starting point of 198 MPs was less than Labour at its lowest point in 1983 of 209. Even after adjusting for the boundary changes that came into force in the May 2010 election and produced a notional gain for the Conservatives up to 209, the party still faced a huge mountain.
The swing of 4.9 per cent from Labour to the Tories was the third largest since 1945, exceeded only by the huge 10.2 per cent swing to Labour in the Blair landslide in 1997 and the 5.3 per cent swing to the Tories under Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The May 6 swing was exactly the same as the late Sir Edward Heath achieved when winning office in 1970, but it was still not enough to produce an overall Conservative majority, given the number of seats that had to be won.
The Tory share of votes cast, at 36 per cent, was the party’s lowest lower for a century and a half, apart from the three Blair victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005. The most comparable performances were in the 1920s, another era of three-party politics. The Tories won 37 to 38 per cent of the total votes cast in three of the four general elections in the 1920s.
Nevertheless, the Conservatives gained a net 96 seats, rising to 306, only 20 short of an overall majority. This involved 100 gains and four loses (all but one to the Liberal Democrats). This is the largest number of seats gained by the Conservatives at a single general election since 1931 after the collapse of the Labour Government. It exceeds the 62 seats gained by Mrs Thatcher in 1979 and the 58 gained in 1983; and, in its turn, is exceeded only by Labour’s 236 gains in 1945 and 147 in 1997.
Labour lost a net 90 MPs, with 94 losses and four gains (including from independents in Blaenau Gwent and Bethnal Green & Bow). This is by far the worst Labour performance since its debacle in 1931, when it was reduced to just 52 MPs. Since the 1945 election, the biggest Labour losses of seats have been 78 MPs in 1950, 76 in 1970, and 60 in 1983.
The Lib Dems suffered a net loss of 5 seats, down to 57. This involved a loss of 13 seats (all but one to the Tories) and a gain of 8 (5 from Labour and 3 from the Tories).
One of the most striking features of election night was how the Tories won seats very high up on their target list but failed to win ones lower down, the