Sunday, April 06, 2008
Lib Dem 3% drop in ICM poll.......is Nick Clegg to blame?
Mike Smithson on Political Betting, speculates this morning about whether our drop of 3% in the latest ICM poll - CON 43%(+1): LAB 32%(+3): LD 18%(-3) - is as a result of Nick Clegg's candidness last week. Frankly I wouldn't have thought so. I am surprised that we seem to have lost the 3% to Labour when they have hardly had a good week. More likely to be a blip methinks.........and having a daughter who used to work for ICM I know a little more than most about the kind of blips that may occur!
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4 comments:
I fear Mike may be right. It has always been my belief that we elected the wrong man, and the recently found votes, in a way, confirm this.
I'm afraid that our Nick tries too hard to be another Cameron. He does not succeed, and even if he did it would be the wrong thing to do.
Walter
I find Mike Smithson's analysis pretty convincing, too. The leadership election was always projected by Huhne's people as depth versus surface, and any sense among the public that Nick is 'preening' could be very damaging. He's clearly a very capable leader, but this is the sort of mistake he ought to have been aware of.
Russ
I suspect the 21% was the blip - 18% is more in line with other polls.
The problem with pb.com is the tendency to react to every poll movement as though it was a trumph or a disaster without stopping to think that polls have a 3% margin of error. It's not helped either by pb.com being full of Tory Trolls like our 'anonymous' friend here.
18% is a pretty solid base from which to build for a 2010 election. The challenge for the next two years is to establish a platform that is distinctive from Brown's dinosaur politics and Cameron's attempt to hide the fact that the Tories are still at heart the Nasty Party of old. Luckily, the most obvious way to do that is to be confident (even strident) in our appeal to liberal values.
The ICM poll will have a margin for error of plus or minus 3%. So the Lib Dems may be on 15% or 21%.
We need to focus on trends not individual results.
As I have argued elsewhere, the trends are pretty good but Nick needs to build his profile and his credibility.
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