Yesterday we were out in force in Pudsey, with 14 People's Vote volunteers adding to the impressive crowd of Labour activists canvassing round the town to try and unseat the incumbent Tory Stewart Andrews who has a slim 331 vote majority. In the steady drizzle and occasional light rain we found ourselves walking the streets with the candidate herself, Jane Aitchison. It was, despite the weather, an uplifting day.
She has quite a bit of support on the doorstep, so it's not impossible she will succeed.
This weekend the polls are still indicating a Tory victory with Reuters putting the majority at 50 seats, according to the results from number-crunching firm Datapraxis, published by the Sunday Times.
Elsewhere, Savanta ComRes report Johnson's lead is narrowing down to 10 points, still significant while The Daily Mail puts it at 13%. These are all disappointing figures from the remainer viewpoint but there is still hope. The Guardian report that Johnson's lead is exactly the same as Theresa May's at the same stage in 2017 and we all know what happened to her.
Bruce Anderson in The Spectator tries to reassure nervous Tories that Johnson is not going to 'blow-it' like May did, but his confidence could be overdone. In 2017 Corbyn was more popular than he is now, that's true. And Boris Johnson has that sunny optimism which appeals to a certain type of voter. He is also capable of huge gaffes and his policy grasp is thin to non-existent so I expect some high profile own goals from him between now and polling day.
The reason to be a bit more optimistic is threefold. First, there is a huge tactical voting effort going on the likes of which have never been seen before, led by The People's Vote campaign. Our volunteers in Pudsey, for example, are helping Labour canvass every one of the 40,000 houses in the Pudsey constituency, something they have never done before. This is happening the length and breadth of Britain in 100 target marginals and nobody really knows how this could influence the outcome.
Second, the drive to get more young people registered to vote is having an impact with another 30,000 added to the electoral register on Friday alone.
Finally, a December election is not going to swell the turnout figures. Expect those to be well down on 2017 with elderly people far more likely to give polling a miss due to the bad weather and early nights. Also, we pick-up on the doorstep a lot of exhausted voters totally turned off by the current political stagnation.
However, an article in Prospect Magazine argues this election is not quite as unpredictable as people think but this is because:
"Last time one or two pollsters got close to the eventual result in the end, so we might hope this will happen again, but it’s not much use if we don’t know which one or two polls it will be in advance. So the question is whether polling might have learned the lessons and got better? Don’t bank on it: international research by Will Jennings and Christopher Wlezien has shown that polls have not been getting systematically better or worse around the world, they just haven’t been very precise for many years."
I think this is obvious when the Tories lead has been anywhere between 6 and 19% recently. And they say this:
"Risk of systematic polling error, of the kind that we only discover when the results come in, is another reason why it is hard to predict elections. While the average of the polls at the moment is pointing to a comfortable Tory majority of around 56, if there is a polling miss of the scale we saw in 2015 and 1992, but to Labour’s advantage, then the Tories would be short of a majority by nine seats."
So still all to play for.
