Missing, presumed red? The 2010 Lib Dems

I have repeatedly turned to the question of the Lib Dems' impending fate.  It is one of the central questions of the next election: how far will the Lib Dems fall from the 23% they recorded in 2010 and where will those losses be felt most?  Where will their erstwhile voters put their cross if they do desert the Lib Dems?  The next election will be decided in large part by the answers to those questions.

Many electrons have been spilt over these questions, but we are not much closer to an answer, except chronologically.  Perhaps we can refine some of the questions a little further.In this post, I intend to look at the following:

1. What are the Lib Dems currently polling nationally?

2. Can that be reconciled with the constituency polls that Lord Ashcroft has been conducting?

3. If not, what might be causing the discrepancy?

What are the Lib Dems polling nationally?

I like questions of fact.  We need to take this pollster by pollster, so that we don't get confused by differing methodologies.

Populus - the Lib Dems are scoring between 8 and 10%.  They last went outside that range (on the low side) in mid-November.

ICM - the Lib Dems are recording between 10 and 12%.  They recorded 14% in December, but otherwise have stayed in that range since last May.

YouGov - rather more grimly for the Lib Dems, YouGov very consistently find their support in the 6-8% band.  They last went outside this narrow band in October, which considering YouGov poll five times a week represents astonishing consistency.

Survation - Survation have a much wider scatter.  In the last few months they have found the Lib Dems at 6%, 11% and all points in between.  Tentatively I'd suggest the range is 6-9%.

Ipsos-MORI - belying its reputation as being very swingy, Ipsos-MORI also has the Lib Dems in a narrow band, consistently finding that they poll between 7 and 9%.  The last time they went outside this range was in March.

ComRes - Aside from one poll in December, you have to go back to 2013 to find an occasion when ComRes found the Lib Dems polling outside a 7-10% range.

Lord Ashcroft - Since July, the Lib Dems have polled between 7 and 9% with Lord Ashcroft in all bar two polls (one with them at 10%, one at 6%).

Opinium - until this week, the Lib Dems recorded between 6 and 9% since July (this week's poll had them at 5%).

TNS-BRMB - the Lib Dems have recorded in a wider range with TNS-BRMB, with scores between 5 and 9% in the last year.

So if we look at the position on a pollster by pollster basis, it seems fairly clear that the Lib Dems are becalmed in the polls.  If you believe ICM, they are in low double digits.  Otherwise, the consensus has them in high single figures, with an average somewhere around 8% for almost all pollsters other than ICM, with no meaningful variation over the last few months.

Isn't it nice when a factual question has a fairly clear answer?

Can that be reconciled with the constituency polls that Lord Ashcroft has been conducting?

Gratifyingly, Lord Ashcroft's estimation of the Lib Dems' national polling is very mainstream at a stable 8%, which means that his constituency polls don't need calibration for changing national vote shares and can be read across without too much being required in the use of cold towels.

Lord Ashcroft, reasonably enough, has so far largely confined his constituency polling to marginals.  As a result, we have a skewed set of seats, and we'll have to fill in some blanks.
 

The constituency polling conducted so far falls into the following categories: Lib Dem/Conservative battlegrounds; Lib Dem/Labour battlegrounds; Conservative/Labour battlegrounds; Labour/UKIP battlegrounds; and Brighton Pavilion.  But that may be over-precise - a simple division between seats where the Lib Dems are in contention and the rest may suffice for now.  Obviously, the Lib Dems want to find as many Lib Dem voters as possible in the first set of seats, and if they have to shed any, they would much prefer to shed them in the second set of seats.

And they do seem be shedding votes in the second group of seats.  Across the 89 constituency polls (some are repeats in the same constituency) in such seats, the Lib Dems are averaging between 6 and 7% (closer to 7%, in fact).  This conceals substantial variations: the Lib Dems would lose their deposit in 23 of these polls and they are recorded at as low as 2% in North Warwickshire and Thurrock. 
 

They are also shedding votes in their own battlegrounds, but still averaging over 30% across the 57 opinion polls conducted in constituencies where they are in contention (again, there are some repeats).

All well and good, but does this add up?  To which the answer is, mostly.  If we reckon that there are say 70 seats where the Lib Dems would see themselves as in serious contention and use an average of 30%, and use 6.5% as an average for the other 561 mainland seats, we get a Lib Dem overall poll rating of just over 9% - a full percentage point ahead of the centre point of their national polling. 

So the constituency polling is in the same ballpark as the national polling.  It's broadly plausible.  But there is a bit of a difference, and the constituency polling suggests that the Lib Dems are doing a bit better than you'd expect from the national polls.

It may not sound like a big discrepancy, but in the context of such low national poll ratings, 1% is significant, given the sheer volume of national and constituency polls that we have had and their consistency.  It could make the difference of quite a lot of seats, depending on how the two are reconciled.  It needs explanation, or an acceptance that national polling and constituency polling are telling us slightly different things.

Why are the Lib Dems apparently overperforming a bit in the constituencies?

There are a range of possible explanations, not all of which exclude each other.  Here are the possibilities that spring to my mind.

1. Labour safe seats and Conservative safe seats may behave differently from marginals

It is theoretically possible that the Lib Dems will do worst in Labour and Tory safe seats. That doesn't sound desperately plausible to me. No one else will be squeezing their vote.

I suppose that the Lib Dems might be doing particularly badly in safe Labour and Conservative seats where UKIP are pressing.  I can't say that I'm overwhelmed with confidence in that theory.
 

2. The Lib Dems may be losing more support in their safest seats

Same theoretical possibility. Still less plausible: the Lib Dems will be squeezing out the last ounce in such seats. 

3. The Lib Dems may be losing more support in areas where Lord Ashcroft has not so far conducted much polling (Scotland especially, but perhaps Wales and north east England also)

There may be something in this.  The Lib Dems do seem to be doing particularly poorly in Scotland, if the Scottish only polls are to be believed.  However, these seats make up a relatively small proportion of the total, so the underperformance would need to be severe indeed to make the sums add up.

Lord Ashcroft is releasing some Scottish constituency polls tomorrow.  We shall see more then, I guess.

4. The Lib Dems will in fact do less well in one or both of these sets of constituencies 

This has to be a possibility.  The Lib Dems are going to make no effort in seats where they are not in contention, and Lord Ashcroft's polling is based on respondents being prompted to think about who to vote for in their own constituency.  Lib Dem supporters will need to be very committed (or very strongly believe in their civic duty) to turn out in practice.  I expect that some of those who would say that they are going to vote Lib Dem when prompted will be seduced by another party or will stay at home.

What of seats where the Lib Dems are in contention?  Lord Ashcroft derives his headline poll numbers from the second of his two part question, where voters have concentrated on who is standing in their constituency.  That relies on voters going through the same two stage process.  If the Lib Dems' electoral machine is running smoothly, that may be safe.  In seats where the Lib Dems are not so fluent, perhaps it isn't.

5. The national polling understates how well the Lib Dems will do in practice 

This also has to be a possibility.  It may be that voters will turn their minds to their own constituency and decide that the Lib Dems after all should be favoured with their cross.  It is noteworthy that ICM, the one pollster that gets respondents at a national level to think about their constituency, is the one pollster that finds the Lib Dems with a higher level of support.

The Lib Dems may in practice overperform in seats where they have the organisation to get out the vote.  Past performance is not always a guide to the future, but it is at least a guide to where the Lib Dems have the organisational skills.

Conclusions

The Lib Dems have been remarkably steady (or flat, to use a less friendly word) in the national polls.  There is no immediately obvious reason why they should start putting on support in the run-up to the election nationally, though they may do so in their local constituencies if their local MP has a particularly strong profile.

So the key question remains where they will get that support.  We can now expect a lot of lost deposits for the Lib Dems.  As noted above, I expect the Lib Dems to do best where they are organisationally strongest and that the identity of the local MP will be vital to their chances of survival.  For the Lib Dems, everything is local.  There is nothing in the offing that suggests that the Lib Dems are going either to suffer annihilation or to avoid substantial losses.   But the detail remains uncertain, and will depend in large part on which pollster's methods is closest to the mark.

I appreciate that none of this is particularly ground-breaking but sometimes important conclusions aren't. 

Reality check: testing the betting markets against external data

Up to now I have been working on the basis that the various betting markets on politics reflect the balance of opinion among those who are willing to place money on the outcome, and thus represent the current conventional wisdom about what is most likely to happen.  But that begs the question who are these people who are willing to place money on political bets.  Are their instincts skewed in any ways?

I do not have inside information on those who actually place bets on the political markets, but we can make deductions from the prices as to what motivates them to bet.  So let's look at one set of constituency markets.

A straight choice

To make it easy, I'm going to focus just on the Conservative-held seats that are Labour targets.  I'm going to exclude all seats where any other party is priced at 5/1 or less (or shorter than Labour), to cut out triangular fights.  That leaves 91 of Labour's first 125 targets.  Here they are arranged in order of swing required for Labour to take them:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bygi8eZw-4q1aTdyeVlzanNRSDQ/view?usp=sharing

The first thing to notice is that the prices are driven by considerably more than swing.  The first seat on the list, North Warwickshire, is rated by punters as a less likely Labour gain than the 23rd seat (Brentford & Isleworth).  The 87th seat on the list, Portsmouth North, is rated a more likely Labour gain than the 50th seat, Vale of Glamorgan.  There is clearly a correlation with swing, but it's far from perfect.

Swing vs odds

Let's look at these seats reorganised by odds (I've used the Conservative prices):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bygi8eZw-4q1X0dpN2g2bEdkaWc/view?usp=sharing

I've also changed the numbering so I you can easily see the movements between these two lists.  On average, there is a difference of over six places for each seat between these two lists.  Note, I have deliberately constructed a set of comparable seats with minimal third party interference (Dudley South, Crawley and Brigg & Goole being the only seats on the list where any other party is significantly affecting the two main parties' odds).  Yet punters seem sure that uniform national swing is going to be varied from fairly markedly even within this most typical of sets of seats.

19 seats shift 10 or more places, as follows:

20 or more places

Portsmouth North

Stockton South

Enfield North

15 or more places 

Dudley South

Calder Valley

Morecambe & Lunesdale

Ealing Central & Acton

Bristol North West

10 or more places

Erewash

Plymouth Sutton & Devonport

Gloucester

Stafford

Corby

Brentford & Isleworth

Preseli Pembrokeshire

Pudsey

Crawley

Milton Keynes South

Rugby

The bigger the shift, the more compelling a reason we should be looking for to justify that shift.  In some cases, the reason will become apparent.  In others, I can't see why there are such big movements.

Uniform national swing

Leaving aside the internal movements, let's think further about the implications of uniform national swing.  In the last few YouGov polls, Labour have posted 33% (give or take a point either way) and the Conservatives have posted 32%.  That is a swing across the UK of 4%.  That would mean that Labour could reasonably expect to take every seat up to Stevenage, the 47th seat on the list.  But Labour are in fact odds against or second favourite  in every seat bar one after Keighley, the 39th seat on this list, where only a swing of 3.1% is required.

If that is true of national swing, it is still more true of the position discounting Scotland.  Labour are racking up a swing against the Conservatives of 5% or more outside Scotland, suggesting still greater gains.  Evidently this does not faze punters on the constituency markets. 

And all this is minor compared with the "most seats" markets.  On Betfair, Labour and Conservative are both just about evens to get most seats.  This implies a swing to Labour in these constituencies of under 2%, even allowing for the SNP taking a big bite out of Labour's Scottish seats.  If you take this view of affairs, you should instead be betting on the Conservatives at odds against on the constituency markets in seats like Hastings & Rye and Nuneaton.

Clearly punters are expecting the swing to Labour to subside a bit from present levels.  You need to decide for yourself whether that is reasonable.

Geography

Geography is destiny, so they say, but punters don't seem convinced.  These 91 seats are spread across nine regions: there are no Scottish seats.  If we leave the one seat in the north east to one side as representing too small a sample (I will not be expecting a major Conservative renaissance in the north east on the basis of Stockton South), the regional pattern is quite muted.  In London and the South East, the Conservatives are rated by punters at 3.6 and 3.7 places per seat worse than uniform national swing would suggest.  In Wales, the Conservatives are rated by punters at 2.5 places per seat better than uniform national swing would suggest and in the East the Conservatives are rated by punters at 3 places per seat better than uniform national swing would suggest.  But otherwise, the effects of geography aren't worth noting.  I should record that the result in the South East is almost entirely attributable to one seat: Portsmouth North (and that we would see the Conservatives rated at 3.7 places per seat better in the West Midlands than uniform national swing would suggest if the unusual seat of Dudley South is excluded).

I think that punters are probably underestimating the effects of geography at the next election.  In particular, as we shall see, there is quite a bit of evidence that Labour are outperforming in London and I'm not convinced that this is adequately reflected in the markets yet.

Polls

Unlike previous general elections, we have had a plethora of constituency opinion polls, particularly for this section of constituencies.  Survation have polled in Stockton South and Crewe & Nantwich, while Lord Ashcroft has polled in no fewer than 50 of these seats.  Both Lord Ashcroft and Survation stress that opinion polls are snapshots not predictions, but in the absence of more direct methods of getting information for predictions, opinion polls are inevitably going to be used to some extent to help punters make predictions.

Here are all the polls for constituencies on this list, in decreasing order of Labour lead:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bygi8eZw-4q1SUs3OGJJSXpuUzQ/view?usp=sharing

I've also included a column in the table of seats organised by odds (in the link given further up) which includes the headline poll figure.

Only 11 of Lord Ashcroft's constituency polls show a lead for the Conservatives, and only one of the Survation polls.  But punters don't really seem to be taking all that much notice of these constituency polls.  Only 12 of the constituencies noted above that have moved ten or more places out of order from uniform national swing on the odds table have constituency polls.  Labour are shown just on the seats polled to be presently ready to take 40 of the 51 seats polled.  Either the punters don't believe the polls or they are expecting swingback to the Conservatives.

As can be seen from the table above, there are some anomalies.  The Conservatives are rated less likely to take Hove than Carlisle, despite recording only a 3% deficit in Hove and an 11% deficit in Carlisle.  The Survation poll in Crewe & Nantwich seems to have been essentially ignored.

Should punters be taking more notice of the constituency polls?  It's hard to know how much weight to put on them, because in Britain we have limited experience of their use and this has been drastically increased in advance of this election.  I have reservations about them, since they involve the compilation of non-standard polling bases for each constituency.  The risk of mistakes is much greater and there is always the risk that a poll in a particular constituency is an outlier.  A surprising result may just be a quirky sample - these things are to be expected from time to time.

But having disparaged them, I also recognise that they are the best information that we have in most seats.  We ignore them at our peril.

How best to use them?  It would be unwise to rely on single polls uncritically.  Where we have more than one poll in a single constituency, as in Stockton South, we can be much more confident about the underlying picture.  Unfortunately, that is the extent of the seats on this list with two polls.

As with any opinion poll, the headline figure of each poll should be treated as in the rough area of the actual lead.  So a finding of a 5% lead might easily be 2% or 8% - 5% is merely the single most likely lead on the data available.  Where the two parties are found to be dead level, it is equally likely that each was in reality in the lead in the constituency at the time the poll was taken.  But a finding of a 10% lead is unlikely to mask a reality where both parties are neck and neck. 

Again, we should always remember that a poll is a snapshot not a prediction.  Things may change.

I am more confident when we can look at comparable constituencies together.  So with that in mind, I have prepared a list of the seats by region:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bygi8eZw-4q1MWZMMXpFOFBrLTA/view?usp=sharing

In the north west, the Conservatives are apparently outperforming in both Morecambe & Lunesdale and Blackpool North & Cleveleys, given the size of their majorities in those seats.  The fact that we have two Lancashire coastal constituencies telling the same story strengthens the credibility of both polls.  We don't have a poll yet for South Ribble, but might that outperformance extend down the coast?

In the east midlands, punters seem not to believe that Lincoln or Amber Valley are quite close, despite Lord Ashcroft's polls suggesting that the Conservatives are only a bit adrift, apparently relying more on the small swing required to take them.  If you do take the view that the Conservatives might revive a bit against Labour, both of these seats are worth considering for a bet on the Conservatives.

There are substantial swings to Labour in every London Conservative/Labour marginal so far polled except Harrow East.  That makes that particular poll a little suspect in my eyes (particularly since the pattern of a strong Labour performance is also reflected in polls in Hampstead & Kilburn and various Lib Dem/Labour marginals).  At present, neither Finchley & Golders Green nor Enfield Southgate are seen as disproportionately likely to fall to Labour.  If the trend is replicated in those constituencies once polled, the odds on Labour are likely to be cut sharply.  I'm already on Labour in Finchley & Golders Green from last year and I've now invested a small sum in Labour in Enfield Southgate too.

In the west midlands, the Conservatives seem to be bearing up fairly well in general.  The Wolverhampton South West poll will disappoint them, and the poor odds on the blue team in Dudley South reflects an extraordinary poll from Lord Ashcroft in Dudley North which shows UKIP a whisker behind Labour.  But the odds on the Conservatives holding Stourbridge, which is adjacent to Dudley South, have so far been completely unaffected by this deduction.  This may be a seat worth a few quid on Labour too.  But take your own view of the matter - Halesowen & Rowley Regis is adjacent to Stourbridge and the results of Lord Ashcroft's poll in that constituency were pretty good from a Conservative perspective, given the size of their majority.

There have been four polls in the eastern region and all four have been fairly poor for the Conservatives.  However, this does not seem to have been noticed.  Perhaps the betting public assume that East Anglia is predestined to be blue.  None of the prices on the Conservatives look attractive and the evens on Labour in Stevenage still looks decent to me, given that Labour recorded a lead of 5% in a recent poll.

Mysterious seats

Even after taking all these points into consideration, some of the large movements look odd. Why are the Conservatives so poorly thought of in Portsmouth North?  Why are Labour thought so likely to win Bristol North West from third?  Why is Rugby seen as so safe for the Tories?  None of the information available seems strong enough to justify large deviations from the norm.  Betting against these anomalies seems sound.

Summary

Punters do seem to be taking a sunnier view of the Conservatives' chances on the betting markets than the current information would suggest if no further polling movements take place, apparently on the assumption that in the run-up to the election, the polls will swing back in the direction of the Tories.  The movement being anticipated is not all that large on the constituency markets, so far as one can judge from the constituency polls so far conducted.  The movement expected on the general "most seats" markets is larger, and must be correspondingly less likely.

Some of the seats seem to be irrationally regarded as safer for the Conservatives than the information available suggests, and some the reverse.  There remain betting opportunities, even in the simpler problems posed by a straight fight between the two main parties.

Environmentally unfriendly: who loses from an increase in the Green vote?

I last wrote about the Greens' prospects of taking more seats at the next election. My conclusion was  that  in general those prospects were ethereal. For more details, see here:

http://newstonoone.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/a-short-story-greens-target-list-for.html

But the Greens are currently recording poll ratings well in excess of their vote share at the last election and just as importantly are standing in many more constituencies. At the Green Party conference, their leader Natalie Bennett committed to having Green candidates in at least 75% of constituencies (that's in the region of 500 seats), up from 310 at the last election.

At the last general election, the Greens took 0.9% of the national vote share but on that reduced number of seats fought.  Presumably they stood in what they considered to be their better seats, so we cannot simply scale that up to get a full notional national vote share.  On a wholly unscientific basis (psephologists, look away now), I'm going to work on a notional national vote share of 1.5% at the last election.

Right now, the Greens are polling rather better than that.  As of today's date, the UK Polling Report average is 4% and they have polled as high as 8% in one poll in recent days.  It's worth noting that most pollsters do not immediately prompt for the Greens.

Even at 4%, we can expect the Greens to have an increased impact on results, even where they come nowhere near taking the seat.  At 8%, their impact would be substantial.  So what are the seats where their influence will be felt most and who will it affect?

This is one of those occasions where I can be lazy (I always enjoy those), because the bulk of the work has already been done for me by Ian Warren of Election Data:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/green-party-will-have-a-significant-if-not-decisive-impact-on-the-2015-election/

The key passage is as follows:

"My analysis has shown that the following demographic groups voted for the Greens in 2014:

• Well educated singles living in purpose built flats
• City dwellers owning houses in older neighbourhoods
• Singles and sharers occupying converted Victorian houses
• Young professional families settling in better quality older terraces
• Diverse communities of well-educated singles living in smart, small flats
• Owners in smart purpose built flats in prestige locations, many newly built
• Students and other transient singles in multi-let houses
• Young renters in flats with a cosmopolitan mix"

Wildly simplifying, I interpret that to mean in the main students and right-on urban dwelling professionals.  I hope Mr Warren will forgive that simplification.  

If the Greens aren't going to win many new seats, whose support are they eating into and whose chances are diminished as a result?  These are two different questions.

It is my assumption that the Greens pull their voters from the pool of voters who in the broadest terms could be labelled progressive, and who at various times in the past would have considered voting for the Lib Dems or Labour (or in Scotland the SNP).

Up to this point in the Parliament, these voters in England and Wales had looked like coalescing primarily around Labour, often having previously voted in 2005 and 2010 for the Lib Dems.  Labour may not be losing voters from 2010, but it may be failing to convert voters who it had previously banked on converting.  So in England and Wales, any increase in the Green vote is going to be bad news for Labour in any seat in which it is in contention.  The question is how bad.

Despite the name of the party, you generally find students and right-on urban dwelling professionals in large cities (obviously you'll also find students in smaller cities with big university populations).  In Britain's largest cities Labour hold the great bulk of the seats, often with large majorities.  At an election where a swing to Labour is currently anticipated, the impact in such seats of the Greens will be of footnote interest only.

There is, however, a set of seats where the battle is entirely between progressive parties.  Here are the Lib Dem held seats where Labour were second at the last election or are otherwise now seen in the betting markets as a main challenger:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bygi8eZw-4q1akxsTnFWc3VaTk0/view?usp=sharing

There is a substantial overlap between these seats and those where the Greens are likely to do relatively well.  Up to the last election, the Lib Dems had made great inroads into the university seats.  Bristol West, Bath, Cambridge, Cardiff Central, Manchester Withington, Norwich South and Sheffield Hallam are all currently Lib Dem held seats with substantial university votes.  In all bar Bath, Labour are currently rated their closest challenger by the bookies.  The next election will be held in termtime, so we can expect most students to be voting in their university constituencies.

It's fair to say that the Lib Dems' USP in relation to university education has been tarnished.  The volte face on tuition fees has seriously damaged the Lib Dems' image.  Labour have been hoping to profit as a consequence.

In the most recent ICM poll, Labour tally 35% and the Lib Dems are at 11%.  That represents a 9% swing from the Lib Dems to Labour (other pollsters are recording slightly bigger swings).  As can be seen, a uniform swing of this size would enable Labour to take 12 seats, with hopes of taking two or three more if they slightly outperform the swing required.

If some of the votes in these seats that might otherwise have been heading from the Lib Dems to Labour head to the Greens instead, this makes Labour's task harder (a Lib Dem vote lost to the Greens is worth half as much to Labour as a Lib Dem vote that comes directly to them).  But the movement would be quite substantial before it made much of a difference.  Labour look unlikely in practice to take either Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey or Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross in any case, given the disruptive effect of the SNP on Scottish politics.  Bristol West might well be put out of reach, as might Bermondsey & Old Southwark.  Sheffield Hallam always looked a big stretch, as did Leeds North West, and the impact of the Greens might be to make the odds on the Lib Dems still more promising. 

In all of the bolded seats named above, the Lib Dems now look like the value bet, taking the rise of the Greens into account.

Any rise in the Green vote in Cambridge is similarly likely to be helpful for Julian Huppert, the Lib Dem incumbent.  I do not place too much weight on the ICM constituency poll in Cambridge in April 2014 showing him well behind, which was based on a small sample and did not name the candidates.  He is a very active local MP and is likely to have a strong personal vote which such a form of polling will not capture (indeed, the ICM poll asked questions about his performance later and he was given a firm thumbs-up).  Lord Ashcroft's poll in September 2014, on a larger sample, found that when the constituency was named and respondents were prompted to think about the candidates standing, Labour polled 33%, the Lib Dems 32% (and the Greens 8%, which is pretty impressive considering that they were not prompted for).  However, this poll is also problematic, because it was taken from 3-12 September, before the university term began.  Students make up almost 20% of the town's population.  It is far from clear how this telephone poll was conducted to capture those students in the results, given the unusual nature of this constituency.  We have the competing forces of the polling possibly not yet fully reflecting the make-up of the constituency and the MP's personal profile not yet being fully drawn out through the polling questions asked.  We have much more information about this seat than most, but no more clarity.

The effect of the Greens should not be overstated.  Lord Ashcroft undertook a constituency poll in Cardiff Central in September of this year, showing that the Lib Dems remain well adrift there, even though he found a 5% poll share for the Greens:

http://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Cardiff-Central-Full-tables-Sept-14.pdf

The effect is going to be at the margins only.  You will note that Ian Warren found Cardiff Central to be the constituency with the most fertile ground in the country for Green vote-hunting.

In Scotland, the dynamics are quite different.  Here the party who has most to lose from a rise of the Greens is the SNP.  The Greens and the SNP fought shoulder to shoulder on the Yes side of the referendum debate.  The SNP will be hoping so far as possible to convert the Yes votes into SNP votes.  Any that take a detour into verdant fields will reduce the SNP's prospects of getting the huge swings that they need to take substantial numbers of new seats.

Let's look at the SNP's target list ranked by odds:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bygi8eZw-4q1VGVsZ3Zsa2lqck0/view?usp=sharing

The SNP's sharp moves upwards in the polls now look very fully priced in.  Any possible impact from the Greens does not.  There are no obvious bargains on the SNP side of the fence (Dundee West aside) and some of the Labour prices now look worth considering.

There is the suggestion that the Greens and the SNP might come to an arrangement:

http://brightgreenscotland.org/index.php/2014/10/the-next-green-mp-peter-mccoll/

"There has been serious speculation about the SNP standing down in the seat [Edinburgh East] in exchange for the Greens giving them a free run at a few of their key targets. From their perspective, they are never going to win every MP in Scotland. If they can do something to make it more likely that one of the other seats is someone else who supported independence, if they can ensure Scotland sends to Westminster a delegation of MPs which represents the diversity of the Yes campaign, then this will be helpful to the thing they care about most – securing more powers for Holyrood."

This would be a smart thing for the SNP to consider.  They can't afford to lose even a couple of percentage points to the Greens elsewhere, given the swings that they require.

Finally, the Greens may yet have a part to play in straight Conservative/Labour battles and in particular straight Conservative/Lib Dem battles.  The effect of the Greens' intervention is unlikely to be anything like as significant as the effect of UKIP's intervention in most such constituencies. But it needs to be factored in.

In such seats, the advantage will be entirely for the Conservatives, because the progressive vote will be split.  In straight fights between the Conservatives and Labour, any increase in the Green vote will concern Labour.  If the Greens do well in seats like Stroud and Brighton Kemptown, they will be depleting the stock of progressive voters available to Labour.  Another way of looking at this is to consider whether this is a way that the cohort of 2010 Lib Dem voters who have defected to Labour will be diminished.  It may be.

As I noted in my previous post, an increase in Green support is likely to prove fatal for the Lib Dems in Solihull.  It may make the Lib Dems' large majority in Bath that bit more within reach for the Conservatives (though as a 5/1 shot, it's hardly a bargain).  In a whole slew of seats in the south west, the Greens didn't stand in 2010.  Any votes that they pick up in 2015 in such constituencies are unlikely to be to the Lib Dems' benefit.

Another area where the Lib Dems will be shifting uneasily is south west London.  The Greens did stand in the Lib Dem constituencies in this area in 2010, but did not poll well.  They will hope to do considerably better in 2015, given the Lib Dems' decision to enter a coalition with the Conservatives - though interestingly there was no sign of this in Lord Ashcroft's constituency polls in this area.  A shift of Lib Dem votes to Greens in these seats could be worth in effect something like a 2% swing to the Conservatives without the blue team picking up a single additional vote.  This effect may also be under-recorded by pollsters who do not prompt for the Greens (though in practice I expect that many voters who are surprised and delighted to find a Green option in the polling booth would have said previously that they were voting for Labour when asked).  I don't see this as a decisive consideration such as to alter my betting positions, but it is one more negative when deciding whether to back the Lib Dems in the constituency markets.

The cloud of unknowing: the seats with no clear favourite

To date, I've looked at the constituency betting markets thematically, whether by party or by region. In this post I shall look at the seats that the betting markets identify as close, and see what themes emerge from those. Here are the seats that have a favourite priced at 1/2 or longer:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bygi8eZw-4q1ZnNHQk9ISnZLOW8/view?usp=sharing

I've included only those parties listed at 10/1 or lower. Longer shots may come home, of course, but for now I'm focusing on what the markets think is well within the bounds of possibility.

The first thing to note is that there aren't actually that many seats without a strong favourite. In all bar these 75 seats, the betting markets are tolerably clear about what punters see is the likely result. And indeed, 33 of these 75 have a favourite at 4/7 or longer. True toss-ups are few and far between. You can see why critics of First Past The Post think that it means that very few voters' votes matter.

(You could, of course, take the opposite view, that punters are showing too much certainty about the outcome of the election. I tend to this view. In many seats, the impact of UKIP's disruptive rise and the Lib Dems' disruptive fall seems harder to predict than is assumed. There are betting opportunities there as a consequence.)

Where are gamblers least certain of the outcome? Some themes are obvious. Wherever the Lib Dems are in contention, uncertainty follows. 26 of the 57 Lib Dem held seats are on this list - on a pro rata basis, you'd expect to see seven. No one really has all that much of a clue how the Lib Dems are going to do. 

Only 34 of the seats are seen as straight Conservative/Labour battles (all of them are Conservative held). Given how many more straight Conservative/Labour battles there are than Lib Dem held seats, this suggests that gamblers feel that they have much more of a handle on such seats.

Wherever UKIP appear, they sow confusion in punters' minds. 14 of the seats where they are listed at 10/1 or less appear on this list.  

Unsurprisingly, where three or more parties are in the mix, the seats are less predictable. All eight of the seats with a favourite at evens or longer have three or more parties in serious contention.

What's missing? Only three Labour seats feature. The only seat from the north east is Berwick-upon-Tweed (Lib Dem held, of course). Only five London seats feature. 11 Scottish seats are on the list, but nine of these are Lib Dem held.

How to approach betting on such seats? Cautiously, and the further down the list you go, the more cautious you should be. There's a reason why there's no odds-on favourite in Argyll & Bute: it's as clear as mud. I'm by inclination lazy and I prefer simple betting propositions to complicated ones. This list has a disproportionate number of complicated betting propositions. I'm happy to leave those to others.

It's important to sort between the two different types of uncertainty. There's chaotic uncertainty (wild seats) and then there's the uncertainty you get when you're at the centre of the swing of the pendulum. The Conservative/Labour battlegrounds are the latter, while the three and four way marginal are the former. Different strategies work for each.

In the wild seats, there can be money to be made if you think there's an anomaly that hasn't been properly corrected. With Mike Hancock stepping down in chaotic circumstances in Portsmouth South, it seems unlikely to me that there will be an orderly grooming of a Lib Dem successor candidate to inherit the substantial personal vote that he presumably built up over 30 years' involvement with the seat. The Lib Dems now have a new candidate in place, Gerard Vernon-Jackson, who was mayor of Portsmouth for 10 years and who has been personally close to Mike Hancock - he has made some eyebrow-raising remarks in support of Mike Hancock which will no doubt feature on other parties' electoral literature if he looks to be in contention next year. With the Lib Dems having slumped in the polls nationally, 8/11 seems considerably too short on the Lib Dems without either an incumbent or a succession plan. I'm unclear whether the Conservatives or UKIP will benefit most (my hunch is the Conservatives), but I don't need to choose: by backing both, I can get a better than evens shot that the Lib Dems will lose.

Conversely, UKIP's impact in some seats seems to have resulted in the odds on some favourites having lengthened too far. The Conservatives look a decent bet at 4/6 in both Camborne & Redruth and St Austell & Newquay. UKIP will be concentrating their resources on their best bets in the south east of England and to take a seat will need them to work their ground game especially well, making them longer shots than recent constituency polls might suggest. (As a general point, kippers seem to be enthusiastic gamblers, and since there are relatively few seats where they are in contention, the odds on UKIP often seem shorter than would be justified objectively.) I've made these bets, but I don't feel half as confident about them as I do about some others.

I've banged on about this on several occasions, but the Scottish Lib Dems in general are way too short priced. At their present levels of polling, they will not retain anything like 11 seats. That they are no worse than 4/1 in any of their Scottish seats (and worse than 6/4 in only two) is absurd. At present polling levels in Scotland, they would be delighted to retain half this number. I'm already on their opponents in many of these seats. The longer they go on without a polling revival, the better these bets look.

In those seats with no clear favourite because the pendulum has stopped there, we need to assess whether they have been rated correctly in their relative order. Ealing Central & Acton stands out as a good bet on Labour at 10/11: there's a large Lib Dem vote to squeeze and the excellent local results for Labour in London this year suggest that Labour will outperform here. The 4/6 on the Conservatives in Bristol North West looks very kind, given that second favourites Labour would need to take the seat from third - something that has happened five times in total in mainland Britain in the last three general elections.

But the most valuable aspect of this table is to remind me to be careful. When others aren't confident that they know what's going on, I should not assume that I have any special insight.

The untactical right: Conservative voters in Lib Dem/Labour marginals

I have mainly concentrated on the Labour/Tory battleground. I make no apology for this: this is where the election will be decided and this is where most of the constituency betting opportunities are. But for completeness, I ought to put up a brief post on the Lib Dem/Labour marginals.

I have already looked at the likely behaviour of 2010 Lib Dems in these seats. I came to the conclusion that those voters who have defected to Labour have made their minds up and will not be returning. This leaves the question whether the Lib Dems can encourage more Conservative supporters to lend them their votes.

In favour of this notion, Tories who had previously thought that the Lib Dems were surrogate socialists may have changed their minds following five years of coalition. Some prominent Lib Dems have enthusiastically made the case for austerity - Danny Alexander for one. (Others, however, have been Hamletesque in their public anguishing over getting into bed with the evil Tories.)

Historically, the Lib Dems have not had much success at this (in stark contrast to their ability to harvest Labour tactical votes when they are competing with the Conservatives).  I attach a list of the Lib Dem seats where Labour are in contention:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_E2fZ0culEKFsCzmrCCLAfLra1gTv6rSmoOEpfpenSg/edit?usp=sharing

The average Conservative vote share in these seats is nearly 19%.  Admittedly, four of these seats have Conservatives in second place at present, but even without those four, the average is still 17%.  The Conservative vote in these seats has remained resilient.

To date, the polls have betrayed no hint that such Conservative voters are amenable to the idea of tactical voting, but that is not necessarily that informative, since these voters have not thought about the idea before and they may not have processed the concept as yet this time either.  Will they do so this time around?

This is one of the unknowns of next election. My default expectation is that we will not in general see the Lib Dems tap into this potential voting resource. Too many Lib Dem MPs have been publicly too lukewarm about the coalition to inspire any kind of affinity from Conservative supporters. Before 2010, many Labour supporters saw the Lib Dems as a kid brother to their own party. The Lib Dems in general have done too little to inspire a similar light affection in the minds of Conservative supporters.

As an added disadvantage, with the heavy swings against the Lib Dems, in many seats Conservative supporters will reasonably conclude that the Conservatives stand at least as good a chance as the Lib Dems of getting elected. Why vote for ginger beer rather than champagne when champagne is also on the menu?

Some MPs may be able to appeal credibly for tactical Tory support. Anecdotally, Danny Alexander and Nick Clegg have both been seen as positive contributors to the coalition by Conservatives. Nick Clegg hardly needs the votes, but Danny Alexander does. But his is a constituency where the Conservative vote has already fallen to a relatively low 13.3%. I am doubtful whether he can get that all that much lower.

In summary, while this in theory looks like a tempting source of votes for Lib Dem incumbents, in practice I think they are going to find these voters tough going to convert. I'm very bearish about Lib Dem chances in such seats in general and so my betting approach is generally to be very cautious indeed about backing Lib Dem chances in such seats, and to consider strongly backing Labour challengers in these seats even where large swings are required. Having lost the casual affection of many left of centre voters, they have failed to gain in compensation the casual affection of right of centre voters. There is only so far that a personal vote can take you. If the Lib Dems are holding half of these seats this time next year, they will have done very well indeed from the current starting point.

The hunt for 2010 Lib Dems. Part 3: Conservative/Labour marginals

In 2010, Britain was swept by Cleggmania.  Off the back of a highly successful air campaign, the Lib Dems attracted new voters up and down the country.  Unfortunately for them, they mainly did so in seats where they had no prospect of success and they actually lost seats to the Conservatives, falling back from 62 seats to 57 seats.

So the Lib Dems had a substantial vote share in the Conservative/Labour marginals where the next election will be decided.  Much attention has been placed on this group.  The Lib Dems have declined sharply in the polls and these votes will play a big part in the outcome of the next election.

First things first, how many of them are available to be snaffled by rivals?  As I noted yesterday, Lord Ashcroft found that they had declined in the 32 most marginal Conservative/Labour seats by just over half, matching the decline in the national opinion polls.  In seats where the Lib Dems are not seriously campaigning, it seems that they may lose votes in proportion to their national loss of vote share.  This isn't going to be precisely accurate, but uniform national swing clearly doesn't work when we're looking at such dramatic falls in support, so I propose using that.

In those same 32 most marginal Conservative/Labour seats, the Lib Dems averaged 17.5% of the vote.  So on average this puts 9 or 10% of the vote in play, regardless of other voter movements.  That's a big chunk.   In some constituencies, the numbers in play will be substantially bigger.

How these voters have divided between other parties is unclear - different polls have different findings.  Those that have expressed a preference are dividing 2 or 3 to 1 in favour of Labour over the Conservatives, with a non-trivial number going to UKIP.  Anything up to 40% of these voters still don't know how they are going to vote.

Putting these movements into a typical seat, we find that of our 17.5% Lib Dem vote share, Lib Dem don't knows comprise 7% of the electorate, Lib Dems comprise 5%, Labour 3 or 4% and the Conservatives 1% or so.  So there has been a swing to Labour on these voters alone of 1 to 1.5% of all voters (probably closer to 2 to 2.5% of decided voters).  And that's without taking account of any other improvements in Labour support or declines in Conservative support from the last election.  This is a big bonus.

Because of this effect, much attention has been paid to the Lib Dem to Labour switchers.  Are they likely to return to the fold?  In short, no.  All the polling (and anecdotal evidence) suggests that this group comprises the most zealous supporters of Ed Miliband, matched only by an intense dislike of the Conservatives in particular.  I shall look separately at vulnerabilities in Labour's vote, but there's no vulnerability here.  These voters are going to be trooping out next May to vote Labour and will be in danger of pushing the pencil through the ballot paper in their vehemence when they mark the cross.  If these voters do not vote Labour, it will to inflict maximum damage on the Conservatives. A decline in the number of Lib Dem to Labour switchers would not be good news for the Tories: it would mean that Lib Dem incumbents were likely to do better.

There's a big betting point here.  The bigger the Lib Dem tally at the last election, the more of an in-built swing we can expect to see to Labour in Conservative/Labour marginals.  I have prepared the following table of Conservative defence seats where Labour are in contention.  I have added a column where I have notionally allocated a net 25% of the Lib Dem vote tally to Labour, and ordered the seats in order of the notional majority on that basis.  This equates to half the Lib Dem voters switching, and doing so in the ratio 3:1 Labour: Conservative.  I'm open to debate on the exact figures, but this seems a fair starting point to me:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mEvLhpFYXrdpeHs2EAg_K--O5PxYcBoWDwlHuI99iRI/edit?usp=sharing

Where I have put "MAJORITY" in block capitals, Labour would have taken the seat.  So Labour would have won a further 26 seats on this basis.  That would have been enough to have made them largest party at the last election.

It will be apparent from this table that some seats are seriously mispriced.  It repays very careful study.  On this basis, I would rather back the Conservatives to keep Enfield North where Labour need only a 1.91% swing but only 12.2% of the electorate voted Lib Dem in 2010 than backing them to keep Northampton North where Labour need a 2.41% swing but 27.9% of the electorate voted Lib Dem in 2010.  Yet the Conservatives are 11/4 in Enfield North and 5/4 in Northampton North.  These odds are in the wrong order.  There are many similar examples.

And of course, this is just from the starting point of the last election.  Labour will hope to gain other supporters and to see the Conservatives fall back.  However, I suggest this table makes a more reliable guide to the starting point for the next election than looking at the unadjusted results last time around.

In my next post, I shall draw the threads together and try to establish some principles for handling the sharp drop in the Lib Dem vote when considering these markets.