by Atul Hatwal

Just over two weeks ago I posted a projection of huge losses for Labour – over 90 seats – based on dozens of conversations with activists, candidates and officials who cumulatively had sight of tens of thousands of canvass returns.

Since then, I’ve continued those conversations as Labour has apparently surged in the polls.

The result is a marked improvement in London but precious little to cheer about outside the capital.

The last few weeks have seen a strong rise in Labour promises in key seats across London, although constituencies such as Dagenham and Eltham remain very difficult.

But in the West Midlands, Yorkshire, North West and the North East, any improvement has been nugatory.

One campaigner from London who spent time in the North East last week described it as a “nuclear winter for Labour.”

The doorstep returns outside of London are saying that Labour is still running substantially below its 2015 vote, that Ukip votes are transferring in huge numbers to the Tories with losses in prospect of the mid-60s to mid-90s and a lingering possibility that the situation could be even worse come Thursday.

What on earth is happening? Are the doorstep results wrong? Or is it the polls?

In terms of the canvass returns, the data is partial. Labour members and supporters have been knocking doors in core Labour wards, in seats that are under threat. In the last week they’ve been focused specifically on Labour voters.

If there was a shift, this could happening out of sight of the canvassers. For example, Labour might be piling up support in safe Labour seats where there is little activity.

It’s possible and there is likely to be an element of this but the scale of Labour’s poll surge suggests this should be something bigger than just a safe seat phenomenon.

One explanation might be a rise in support among those in a household that don’t normally take part in the doorstep conversation but do answer online polls, such as young voters.

The polls themselves indicate that Labour’s rise is being driven by enthusiasm among young electors with a striking proportion saying they are committed to voting.

But since the rise in the polls, Uncut has heard various stories about Labour candidates and campaigners scouring their electoral rolls to identify households with voters under 25 – whether they live in Labour wards or not, whether they or their families have a history of backing Labour or not.

The feedback has been that in the overwhelming majority of cases, this pool of voters is neither sizable enough to make a difference nor are the canvass returns from these targeted efforts tallying with the level of rise that the polls are suggesting.

So perhaps the problem is with the polls?

There has been a debate within the polling community about how turnout, particularly among the young, should be weighted. It’s summarised here but broadly, the higher the turnout for younger voters in poll results, the better things are for Labour.

This explains why different pollsters have Labour at different levels but not why Labour has improved in most polls at a rate not reflected in the party’s canvass returns, over the past weeks.

James Morris, Ed Miliband’s pollster, tweeted a paragraph on Friday from an article by a US academic just before the Presidential election, which might offer a rationale for why the majority of polls are moving in the same way, out of sync with the doorstep.

Might tweet this every day till next Thurs (from here https://t.co/D26N92FRBy) pic.twitter.com/QP59RmZXdg — James Morris (@JamesDMorris) June 2, 2017

Ironically, the Rivers of Lauderdale and Rivers quoted above is one Doug Rivers. That would be the Doug Rivers who is now the chief scientist of YouGov, who were the first to report a Labour surge during the campaign and currently have the parties just 4% apart.

This would also explain why positive polls for Labour beget further positive polls and momentum builds – supporters are more and more enthused and respond when polling companies get in touch, while the reverse happens with Tory backers.

If the polls are wrong on this basis then that could signal a deep structural problem for the industry.

However, there might be another option. A scenario where the canvass returns and the polling methodology are both right: respondents aren’t being straight with the pollsters.

This has been mentioned by several Labour officials and candidates as a potential reason for the gap.

After the 2015 election, Mark Textor – Lynton Crosby’s business partner and currently doing the polling for the Tories – said that the pre-election polls were distorted because public pollsters failed to understand two factors.

First, the difference between party preference and desired government outcome. Voters might identify with Labour but they didn’t want an Ed Miliband-led coalition so voted accordingly.

Second, that some voters gamed the polls. They used them to signal a protest before reverting to a different choice in the polling booth. It’s worth taking in, what he said,

“We were polling massive numbers of voters every night and assessing how they looked at their choices, so we knew that in normal public-style polls they were saying they preferred Labour … but at the end of the day the actual outcome they wanted was a David Cameron-led Conservative government, and the only way to do that was to vote Conservative in their local seat,” “We measured their preferred style of government … they might say: ‘Normally I prefer Labour’, but we asked: ‘Which scenario do you want as an outcome?’…so we knew there were a lot of voters who on traditional voting patterns were Labour voters but had made the tactical decision that the best choice was to vote for David Cameron … we were measuring outcomes and not just voting preference.” “They were using polling like a protest vote – they might think: ‘I don’t really want Miliband, but I’ll say I prefer him to tickle up the Conservatives’ – or whomever – but we knew at the end of the day when we measured their preferred model in government what they really wanted was the outcome of a stable Cameron-led government.”

Labour campaigners fear something similar is happening right now.

In every seat, canvassers are encountering lifelong Labour supporters who still identify with the party but not Jeremy Corbyn. This group tends to have voted for Ed Miliband reluctantly and are now either sitting out this contest or ready to vote Tory for the first time to prevent a Corbyn premiership.

These switchers represent a new generation of shy Tories, located deep inside Labour’s core vote. They are embarrassed at voting Tory, sufficiently so to deny their intent to friends, families and pollsters. Some of the older Labour officials and campaigners have reported familiar doorstep cadences from 1992 – “It’s in the eyes,” one said to me.

One last point is worth noting in judging what is happening on the ground.

The Tories do not look like a party that thinks Labour is threatening a range of their seats in England, which is what the polls suggest.

Based on what Mark Textor said after the 2015 election, we know something of what they are doing. Large scale nightly polling, targeted at specific seats, with questioning framed as per the quote above. At this stage in the campaign, postal votes – which have been sampled over the past 5 days, giving them an idea of actual vote performance – will also be factored into the mix.

This is then used to shape their social media targeting on Facebook, local newspaper ad buys and visit schedule for the cabinet and leader.

Last Friday, Theresa May visited Sheffield. Specifically she was in Don Valley, Caroline Flint’s constituency, a seat where Labour led the Tories by 21% in 2015. On Saturday, she was in Penistone and Stockbridge, Angela Smith’s seat, where she won by 14% over the Tories in 2015. Tonight, May was in Bradford South, a seat where Judith Cummins beat her Tory opponent by 17% in 2015.

The fear of Labour officials and candidates, particularly in the West Midlands, North East, North West and Yorkshire, is that if the Tories are on course to flip seats like Don Valley, many more could be vulnerable. One official in Yorkshire told Uncut that a string of Morley and Outwoods – the seat Ed Balls lost in 2015 – was on the cards for 2017.

The polls might be right. There could be a surge of young voters that rewrite general election rules. This could be the first contest in living memory where a party increases its rating by so much during the short campaign. Labour could be about to poll near its 1997 level at the general election.

After Corbyn’s triumph in the Labour leadership, Brexit and Trump, the old certainties no longer hold sway. This is certainly the desperate hope of Labour candidates up and down the country. Rarely have so many, who have worked so hard knocking doors, hoped that they’re so wrong.

But the evidence from Labour’s own data and the Tories’ campaigning choices is compelling and it suggests that they are not.

Atul Hatwal is editor of Uncut

Tags: Atul Hatwal, canvass returns, General election 2017, Jeremy Corbyn, polls, regions