It would be interesting to see how many of the ‘lost’ LibDem voters were merely tactical voters who actually support a party in third place or lower in their constituency and leant the LibDems their support as an ‘anti-tory’ vote and now see what that has led to.

I think it may be higher than some commentators imagine as LibDem targetting is ruthless with them ignoring seats they cannot win.

1

I imagine it would be a large % of the “lost” LibDems, with the majority being left of centre voters who voted LD to keep the Tory out in their constituency and fewer being Tories voting LD to keep Labour out.

Not that it helped in my constituency sadly….the Tory vote still exceeded all the others combined

“Clearly, the boundaries between the three groups are porous” is fair but does not really go far enough. The boundaries between all political groups are becoming porous. Voters are more and more apathetic towards an increasingly bland and spineless collection of career politicians who appear to be running the country on behalf of minority special interest groups. It is clearly pointless choosing between the person in the yellow rosette and the one in red or blue because voters get the same feeble government whatever they choose. I think that outside the tiny decreasing minority who are actually members of the three main parties, most voters don’t care for party politics at all. Personally I don’t think that it should be about trying to take voters from one or another party. It should be about offering the people a way out of this malaise, putting them first and ceasing the tedious tendency to treat them as statistics to be manipulated in the name of hollow political victories.

Galen10:

“Not that it helped in my constituency sadly….the Tory vote still exceeded all the others combined”

Same here. It’s depressing to think that more than half the people who bothered to vote put an X next to the name of my useless MP.

4

I suppose that’s part of my “enthusiasm” (altho in truth it’s only one and half cheers rather than three) for voting reform and the referendum, even if it IS only AV: I just hope it shakes things up a bit and makes it more difficult for established parties. Seems to me that it’s about time they all got a really good kick up the arse. Disappointed as I am by the outcome of the last GE and the LD’s role in the Coalition, if it does actually result in a yes vote to AV they will at least have achieved something.

There is a 4th group, lib dem converts people attracted to lib dems because they have entered coalition and therefore responsibility. It is wrong to think that all the traffic is an outward flow.

6

I’m sure the LD’s will be overjoyed to welcome a convert….but their joy may be tempered somewhat by the fact that it’s a six lane motorway in the outward direction, and a jungle track on the inward direction!

“Firstly, this helps to explain generally why approval of the government, and support on key issues, tends to be significantly lower than party support for the Coalition parties.”

A much more major part of this, however, as pointed out by Anthony Wells at UK Polling Report, is that voting intention is rebalanced to exclude “don’t know” and “wouldn’t vote” answers (which make up around a quarter of most surveys), but approval ratings aren’t.

If you just take government approval from those who have expressed a voting preference (which isn’t a meaningful thing to do, but it explains the apparent discrepancy) then you get a small positive number, which is roughly what you’d expect given that the coalition partners still have a thin majority of voters between them.

@ 6

“There is a 4th group, lib dem converts people attracted to lib dems because they have entered coalition and therefore responsibility. It is wrong to think that all the traffic is an outward flow.”

Not to mention people who want a Conservative prime minister but feel ashamed about voting Tory. Most of those would probably have otherwise voted Conservative in the end anyway, but a fair few would otherwise be non-voters or even reluctant Labour voters.

9

“Not to mention people who want a Conservative prime minister but feel ashamed about voting Tory.”

People who voted for Tony Blair you mean….?

@ 10,

Some of them, yes.

I voted Lib Dem for a few years, in disgust at the Iraq War. Now they have disgusted me with the libertarian attack on the welfare state, I shan’t be voting for them again.

clm @8 – thanks for that explanation.

Paul Smith@6 – “There is a 4th group, lib dem converts people attracted to lib dems because they have entered coalition and therefore responsibility. It is wrong to think that all the traffic is an outward flow”.

The article identifies three groups which are about 10% (lost) and 5-6% each (anxious, and content) of the whole electorate. I haven’t seen any evidence that the 4th group is a large one. But their potential/hypothetical existence is noted in the discussion of how the LibDem left’s argument could in theory be countered by the LibDem right; if this 4th group are a very significant group, the party could be perfectly sanguine about the lost and anxious LibDem voters of May 2010. If not, they might be less sanguine.

It would be interesting if somebody has looked into the detail of info about the amount of churn to and from the LibDems.

The lost/anxious/content pattern reflects how LibDem voters before the election were more likely to describe themselves as left or centre-left (43%) than centrist (29%) and much more than centre-right or right (9%). And LibDem voters were more likely to describe the party as left or centre-left (39%) than centrist (33%) or especially centre-right or right (5%) … It will be interesting to see how similar/different those results are in future

This led my colleague Tim Horton to suggest (in the week ahead of the Coalition being formed) that it was probable “that somewhere between a third and a half of Lib Dem voters could find themselves alienated if Clegg teams up with the Tories”.
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/05/lib-con-coalition-would-be-an-electoral-gift-to-labour/

@13

I used to be a Lib Dem voter. But I tend to think that in recent years the top of the party has been taken over by a small clique of right wing ‘Orange Book’ types, who are unrepresentative of most of the party members and voters.

@2:

> I imagine it would be a large % of the “lost” LibDems, with the majority being left of centre voters who voted LD to keep the Tory out in their constituency and fewer being Tories voting LD to keep Labour out.

There’s also a least-of-three-evils contingent, whose real sympathies would lie with some fourth party but who voted LD to keep Labour AND Tories out. On the other hand, I don’t know how many of those were left by May 2010: they mostly came from the Left, so their high noon was in 2005. If still voting for the least-evil by 2010 they’d probably have gone with Labour over the Cleggies.