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Lord Ashcroft’s marginal polls are giving election forecasters a regular dose of entertainment, and political leaderships constant fear.
You can now explore all 89 of his polls on May2015. We have brought together and mapped his eight batches of polling, so you can see exactly what these polls would mean if they came true on election night.
His latest batch was released yesterday. It offered some reassurance for Labour, whose hopes of a majority could have finally faded.
Ashcroft polled 12 Tory-held seats, the 31st to 42nd most marginal ones. He has already polled the 30 seats the Tories won by lesser majorities in 2010. Labour likely needs to win all of these, and another 15 or so Tory seats, to win a majority.
The polls showed the party ahead in nine of them, which is better than some pundits expected. For more, see our earlier take.
See May2015’s map of all of Lord Ashcroft’s seat-by-seat polls.
Taken together, Ashcroft’s polls have in many ways confirmed what the national polls imply. Of the 25 Lib Dem seats he has polled, Clegg’s party are set to lose all but 9. The Tories are on course to lose 32 overall and Labour are due to pick up 47.
But these polls also offer much more than national polls. They show how the Lib Dems are convincingly ahead in seats like Cheadle, Eastleigh, Eastbourne, and Sutton and Cheam, when national polls suggest their single-digit majorities should be overturned.
They also show us how much greater the Lib Dem-to-Labour swing is than the Lib Dem-to-Tory swing. On paper, it looks like the Tories should benefit the most from a Lib Dem collapse. The Conservatives were the second placed party in 19 of the 27 seats where the Lib Dems won by less than 10 per cent in 2010.
The Lib Dem-to-Labour swing is far greater than the Lib Dem-to-Tory swing.
But Ashcroft has put them ahead in only eight of these seats, whereas Labour are challenging the Lib Dems in seats like Cambridge, Bermondsey and Bristol West, all of which they lost by 15-20 per cent in 2010.
That means the net effect of the Lib Dem collapse is currently equal. Both parties are set to win 8 Lib Dem seats and possibly a couple more.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is how many seats are competitive. The party in front leads by less than 5 per cent in 34 of these seats, some of which haven’t been polled since much earlier in the summer. We’ll be keeping track of how any of the numbers change as the news comes in.
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