James Forsyth James Forsyth

Making sense of the polls

If you’re struggling to come to terms with the slew of polling data that is currently circulating take a look at Tim Hames’s column in The Times that does a good job of putting these numbers into perspective. 

This point  is particularly worth paying attention to:

“what has been missed,, though, is the extent to which Labour under Mr Brown has been running its own core vote strategy by stealth. For while the shift from the Blair to Brown era has seen the average Labour vote share increase by 6.5 per cent, that improvement has been strikingly more pronounced among working-class voters (the DEs) than the affluent ABs. To put it crudely, antiBlair old-Labour backers who had defected or abstained have returned to their historic allegiances.”

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