With polling over the Christmas holidays light, now is a good time to take stock of the key trends with just five months to go before election day

Very few events significantly shift public opinion in the immediate term. Change tends to be slow and gradual. A year ago, Labour held a 10-point lead over the Conservatives. That is clearly not the case any longer. While Ed Miliband’s party has enjoyed a spike in support in most polls released over the past week, the trend over the past month has remained relatively stable, with the two main parties virtually tied.

With polling over the Christmas holidays light, now is a good time to take stock of the key trends shaping the election with just five months to go before voting day.

1. Support for the main parties is on record lows

Recent polls show the combined support for Labour and the Conservatives hovering around 60% - down by about 10 points on January. In elections since 1979, Britain’s two main parties won a combined 81%, 70%, 73%, 76%, 74%, 73%, 67%, and 65% in 2010.

The depth of the trend is better highlighted once we take a step back to look at the changes among other parties too. In 2010 for example, the Lib Dems won 23% of vote, leaving all other parties on a combined 12%.

Research by Ipsos Mori has found that this particular trend is likely to get even more acute.

2. Britain has gone from a two-three party system to a six party system

Based on these polls, neither the Conservatives nor Labour are likely to win an outright majority next May. Yet, who between Miliband and David Cameron leads the largest party once all votes are counted matters greatly of course - it will determine who has first dibs at forming the next government.

As things stand, normally Labour would be seen to have a slight advantage due to the electoral geography of Britain’s voting system, but in today’s context, uniform swing calculations aren’t enormously useful.

There is not only a rise in support for the ‘others’, but there is also far greater fragmentation across the electorate. Britain has gone from a two-three party system to a six party system.

Recent polls have SNP, Ukip and the Greens, together above 25%. In 2010 the three parties won 6% of the vote. The fact is all the more remarkable considering that the SNP is a Scottish party, and that both the Greens and Ukip don’t even contest all seats.

In electoral terms, this means that how votes flow between parties will impact the outcome of races at a constituency-level in ways that isn’t always uniform with the overall nationwide vote share. 2015 will be an electoral russian doll - there are hundreds of individual votes within the bigger general election.

YouGov/Times analysis visualises the extent of the change since 2010:

3. A geographical divide, part one: the SNP factor

Jim Murphy the newly elected leader of the Scottish Labour party has a mountain to climb. Polls by YouGov, Survation and Ipsos Mori - all prior to Murphy’s election - have Labour set to be all but wiped out north of the border.

Britain Elects (@britainelects) How Scotland would look according to Survation's Scottish Westminster Poll: SNP - 52 MPs LAB - 5 CON - 1 LDEM - 1 pic.twitter.com/UHuSGqKH42

John Rentoul (@JohnRentoul) Today's YouGov Scotland poll gives SNP 52 seats, Lab 6, Lib Dem 1, Con 0, on uniform swing http://t.co/EAKXKLs063 pic.twitter.com/sj5GWvWUDn

Britain Elects (@britainelects) How Scotland would supposedly look in 2015 if today's MORI poll was the real thing: SNP 54, LAB 4, LDEM 1. pic.twitter.com/SXaNj98Nhx

Labour currently holds 41 seats in Scotland. One brighter spot for Murphy is that there aren’t actually many Labour-SNP marginal constituencies (at least in terms of how a marginal seat would normally be intended). In none of the seats Labour won in 2010, where the SNP came second, was the gap less than 10 points. In only three seats was the gap less than 20-points.

Labour is likely to either hold on to most of its seats in Scotland, or to collapse, and lose most of them.

4. A geographical divide, part two: the UKIP factor

Ukip is unlikely to win more than a handful of seats next year.

The impact Nigel Farage’s party will have on influencing the outcome of individual constituency races will be far greater than the actual number of seats his party will win. This will probably damage Conservative hopes more than Labour prospects. All the focus on Scotland, for the independence referendum first and on shock polls now, has meant less attention has been paid to figures in England. A ComRes poll a week ago had the Tories only one point ahead of Labour south of the border. In 2010, Cameron’s party led Labour by 11 in England. The same poll has Ukip nearing 20%.

Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) Latest ComRes online poll ENGLAND only compared with GE10 England result pic.twitter.com/q7pUA1iaBU

It would be simplistic though to claim that Ukip is only taking votes away from the Conservatives. Before the beginning of last year, six out of every 10 Ukip votes came from the Conservatives. YouGov analysis has found that the proportion of Ukip voters now coming from the Labour party has trebled since January 2013, from 7% to 23%. While this is still lower than Tory converts (36%), compared to earlier Ukip support, Nigel Farage’s support is now more widely distributed.

A significant portion of Ukip’s current support is coming from 2010 non-voters. Ukip’s main challenge will be translating this intention into actual votes, and holding onto its current levels of support for the next five months.

Matthew Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) Here is a slide we shared today. The % of Ukip voters at 2014 Euros who say will vote Ukip at 2015 GE -> pic.twitter.com/cAH2X59nbP

5. How resilient will the Liberal Democrats be?

Nationally, the Lib Dems are now polling nearly on par with the Greens. The Greens, which won less than 1% of the vote in 2010, are now around 5%. More than 80% of the party’s vote in 2015 is expected to come from those who in 2010 supported other parties. Half of that support is coming from Lib Dem voters, and about a quarter is ex-Labour support (the flow from Miliband’s party is particularly significant among young people).

But, because of the first-past-the-post voting system, the two parties will win nowhere near the same number of seats in May 2015. The Lib Dems, who have lost more than 75% of their support, were until recently “only” expected to lose about half of their seats.

How resilient the Lib Dem vote will be next year matters primarily for two reasons.

Firstly, Labour’s electoral fortunes are highly dependant on retaining Lib Dem 2010 switchers. Secondly, Ed Miliband’s party also needs the Lib Dem vote to hold in contests where the party is competing directly with the Tories.

Labour’s electoral chances are facing pressure on both these fronts. On the one hand, the Lib Dem vote is now also flowing to the Greens, at the same time as when Labour voters are heading to the SNP and, to a lesser extent, to the Greens and even Ukip’s way. On the other hand, recent analysis has Clegg’s party retaining fewer than 20 seats - down from 57 MPs in 2010.

6. Saliency of issues

A second area where Ukip has made critical inroads is in shaping the debate around which issues are viewed as most important by voters.

Issue trackers by both YouGov and Ipsos Mori have immigration as the issue of upmost concern for voters.

The saliency of issues matters for two reasons.

First of all, voters trust different parties to handle different issues. Labour is most trusted in managing the health service, the Tories are seen as best at dealing with the economy, while Ukip are viewed as most sensitive to voters’ worries when it comes to immigration. Secondly, because of this, the issue which voters are most concerned about - relative to the other issues they care about - will influence who they vote for.



This leaves parties with a difficult balancing act. They need to have a position on the topics voters feel are most important. But, in parallel to this, they need to make the issues where they’re most trusted on, the more salient ones.

From a Labour point of view, while voters care greatly about the NHS, it currently isn’t top of mind as immigration or the economy are.

Taken together, all these trends and how they evolve over the next few months, make the next election incredibly difficult to predict - opening the door to potentially prickly hung parliament scenarios.

