UK Post-Election Analysis

[YL]

The BBC has an article about Labour's private polling, with some interesting points.

- They never said Labour were as far ahead as the public polls said in mid-term.
- They had the Tories taking the lead after the conferences last October (which is pretty much when the public polls started showing a tie).
- They showed Labour gaining early in the campaign, but falling back once the SNP attacks started.

Now, they say that what they did differently was that they asked other questions -- questions about issues, and general attitudes -- first, before the voting intention question, because they "think it gets them closer to their ballot box mindset".  Normally, this would be frowned on, and I'd certainly think it would have to have been done very carefully not to be effectively asking leading questions.

I'm still minded to look at sampling problems and turnout modelling.  Possibly their questions created a bias in the other direction and the two roughly cancelled out.

[YL]

John Rentoul nails it in this article about why Labour lost.

A couple of things I slightly disagree with though. It wasn't being too left wing that was the main reason for the defeat. It was the lack of credibilty due to the wrong Miliband brother winning Labour's leadership 5 years ago.

It should be noted that Labour won both general elections in 1974 on a left wing ticket. They won those elections because Harold Wilson had credibilty with the electorate (or at least more credibilty than the incompetent Ted Heath).

You don't get anywhere in UK General Elections without having a credible leader who looks and sounds like a prime minister in waiting. David Miliband had that credibility in my view. Ed did not.

David Miliband is basically not that different from his brother but politically more bland.  [See also banana photo.]  Why do you find that more credible?

Would he have stopped the Scottish disaster?
Would he have attracted back former Labour voters now supporting UKIP?  [The size of this phenomenon is exaggerated by some, but it is there.]
Would he have stopped left of centre voters voting Green?
Would he have encouraged more people to actually vote?
Would he have encouraged centre to centre-right voters basically happy with Cameron to consider Labour?

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Not just that, but they fill niches in British politics which don't actually have that much to do with Europe.

[YL]

I'm sure the Labour Party's internal polling would back up my opinion of David Miliband. Labour MP John Mann told the Sunday Politics programme last week that he was told again and again and again on the doorstep that Ed was not of prime ministerial quality and that David was superior.

Yes, but people saying that probably don't remember that clearly what he was actually like as a politician, they're just saying that because he's the person most often mentioned as an alternative leader in the media.  It has very little to do with how he'd actually have performed if elected leader.

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If (and I accept it's an "if") the Tories' scaremongering about SNP influence was decisive in Labour's defeat, then the Scottish disaster was important even though the SNP were likely to back Labour in a hung parliament situation.

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I disagree (well, if by "credible" you mean someone like David Miliband).  If anything I suspect it would have been the other way round.  I suspect I'd have been in the Green column with him as Labour leader.

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Possibly, but there isn't really much evidence either way.  I still suspect that most 2010 Tory voters were basically happy with the government, and electing David Miliband as leader wouldn't have got away from the way that the Tories, aided and abetted by the Lib Dems and Liam Byrne's sense of humour, were allowed to develop the "mess Labour left us" narrative in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 election.

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I'm not talking about UKIP actually winning Labour seats (obviously, as it didn't happen) but people who might otherwise have voted Labour voting UKIP in Lab/Con marginals.  How big a factor it was I don't know, but it was there to some extent, and while I don't have a particularly good feeling for why this type of voter votes the way they do I don't see David Miliband as the sort of Labour politician to attract them back.

[YL]

I guess this is a matter of opinion and judgment but I remember thinking at the time in 2010 that Labour made a nutty decision in that leadership election and the general election result would seem to vindicate that feeling.

What you seem to be saying is that regardless of who led the Labour Party in this election they were always going to lose it. I'm not sure that's really the case. There's certainly no great love for the Conservative Party out there in the country right now.

It's more that I'm saying that I think David Miliband is grossly over-rated, and that I struggle to see why he would have attracted the sorts of voters who Labour should be able to attract but didn't.  Also, what CrabCake said.

You still haven't explained why you find him more "credible" than Ed.

[YL]

Where did the vote from 2010 go?

https://medium.com/@alex_randall/three-questions-about-who-stole-votes-from-who-in-the-2015-election-51714d9ea3a1

http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/homepage.html

Has their own version.  This site seems to have a higher LD->UKIP flow than the one you posted.  Also there is the issue of "if 26% of the 2010 LD vote went to the Greens then would not that leave Greens with too many votes in 2015."

Yes, the first set of numbers are obviously wrong, for that reason.  If the Greens got 26% of 2010 Lib Dems and that only made up half of their 2015 voters, they'd have got about 12% of the vote.

Baxter's (i.e. Electoral Calculus) numbers are much more plausible, though we'll never know for sure.