What factors make it different in the marginals?
Can we identify what’s driving the votes?
Over the past week or so we’ve been putting a lot of focus on the marginals – the seats where the fates of Mr. Brown and Mr. Cameron will be decided.
For there has been a fair bit of polling evidence, still far from conclusive, that there have been sharper moves to the Tories in these places than in the country as a whole.
A key part of the Andy Cooke thesis, see previous thread and others, is that the battle-ground seats saw extraordinary swings to Labour in 1997 the effect of which still carried forward to 2005. If that starts to unwind then we could see disproportionate swings.
On top of that we have the Blair Freebairn analysis that in many cases the urban context and demographic profile of the key seats is different which could be providing the back-cloth for the polling. His central argument was that the election is going to be won or lost in the METTHS – the medium sized English towns and their hinterlands.
So to examine what might be different in this category of seat Bunnco is launching today a series of examinations of what the issues might be. This is running on PB Channel 2 now.
His first insight is that the notion of the much-used term “council house tenant” has all but disappeared in many parts of the country – particularly the METTHS and he wonders whether this will impede Labour.