The Davey Wave

Plus 27 seat previews for east London

Today we have a post from Josh looking at the rising Lib Dem vote share, what’s driving it, and the parallels with 1997. Plus the next set of seat previews covering east London.

These are mostly safe Labour seats, but precisely because it’s such a safe area for them there’s a lot of interesting factional in-fighting that tells us about some of the fault lines there’ll be in the new parliamentary party.

Dad and I recorded a fascinating interview yesterday which we hope to share in the next few days, and we also have a very cool guest post coming up soon.

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Lib Dems, Tactical Voting, and 1997

In the last two weeks the Labour's share of the vote in polling has declined slightly - from around 45% when the election was called, to about 42% now. As discussed in last week's piece on Reform, the rise of Farage’s party is not driving this reduction; nor has there been a change in the number of people who voted Conservative in 2019 switching support to Labour.

Instead, Labour's fall in the polls seems to be partly due to pollsters' changing their methodologies in such a way that depresses the Labour vote share; and partly due to net losses to the Lib Dems. My instinct is that this is a loss of votes for tactical reasons rather than due to disillusionment, because the fundamentals underpinning Labour's position in the polls (Starmer approval ratings; Starmer Best PM lead over Sunak; Labour brand favourability; economic competency, etc.) remain strong.

In fact, Starmer's approval rating is the highest it's been since late 2022 according to YouGov  - the same firm that has put Labour's vote share on an anaemic 37%, compared to ~42% in the polling average. Other firms have found his approval rating rising too. In addition, Dylan’s poll breakdown from last week shows that the Lib Dem bump in the polls appears to be concentrated in the South, which is also suggestive of tactical voting.

The Lib Dem surge