January 14, 201411 yr Maybe I'm just being slow, but I can't understand how it being a comparison between 2005 and 2010 makes it invalid? It clearly shows that they lost more ground in fights against Labour than against the Conservatives. How could it be that one of the reasons the Lib Dems collapsed was because of a fear of Gordon Brown staying Prime Minister, if the Lib Dems managed to hang onto more of their voters in places where the Conservatives were the main opposition and where people who wanted to get rid of Brown had a very easy, ready-made option to make that more likely? Because those graphs don't show you what the position was during Cleggmania, which would show the effects. You're comparing apples with oranges. The argument I'm making is that the Lib Dem vote was due to be bigger in CON/LD marginals and LAB/CON marginals during Cleggmania before the message came out, and then it went down (in numbers form, it would be equivalent of it going from, say, 4.5 to 0.5 in CON/LD seats during Cleggmania, and maybe 2.4 to 0.4 in LAB/LD seats - which is just one example of how those figures could still be squared with that message working). Citing the swing in LAB/LD marginals is irrelevant to that thesis, as either way those voters could expect to 'get Brown'. Ultimately, I think the polling numbers in those last two weeks make the position clear that the main Lib Dem losses were to the Consrvatives rather than Labour in those last two weeks as Labour stayed roughly consistent, unless you're proposing about 3-5% of Lib Dems went Labour at the exact time as 3-5% of Labour went Tory.
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