The big strategic risk, and how to beat it There is a pretty simple pattern to Liberal Democrat general election results. The closer the result appears to be before polling day, the more the focus on who will be the next Prime Minister, and so the worse the Lib Dem performance as the party gets squeezed by a focus on the relative merits of the Labour and Conservative leaders. Those squeezes were seen in 1992, 2015 and 2017, for example, which were seen in advance as being very close, but not in 2001 or 2005, for example, which were seen as predictable wins for the incumbent. The danger looming over the likely 2019 general election, therefore, is clear. With huge uncertainty over the result, coverage may focus in on the different ways Johnson or Corbyn might become Prime Minister and the Lib Dems lose out. The good news, however, is that there are ways for the Liberal Democrats to break that historical pattern and prosper instead. The first is to stick to our strongly anti-Brexit position so that the public don’t see the Lib Dems as somewhere between Labour and the Conservatives, and so get squeezed out as choices polarise in a close contest, but rather see the contest as being one in which the Lib Dems are on one side and Labour and the Conservatives on the other. This was at the heart of the core votes strategy David Howarth and I drew up after the 2015 debacle – and which has provided the basic strategy for the party over the last four years. The second is to ramp up even further the concentrated levels of activity in target seats. This won’t be easy with so many seats possibly looking winnable – and there’s a chance of repeating the 2010 mistake of spreading ourselves too thin. But one way to get this right, to maximise the opportunity without going too thin, is to make full use of those 300,000 or so people who have signed up to at least one of the party’s national campaigns but who are not a member or a registered supporter. I wrote more about that last time, but this time there’s progress to report. Helped by my lobbying for it, the party has started up a pilot project to mobilise these people, and the tens of thousands by new members, by getting them out helping on the ground in target seats. That’s a really welcome move. The third is to use digital campaigning to sidestep and break that media fascination on old-fashioned two-party politics. That’s a challenge where the party’s grassroots and individual members are key because the party’s central digital operation focuses (understandably) very much on raising money, recruiting members and reaching swing voters in target seats. The rest of us need to do the broad national reach beyond that – and that’s why I’ve been giving my digital tools to support just that a special pre-election brush-up. Get these three points right and the uncertainty of a general election can become a strength for the Liberal Democrats. In uncertain political times, you need a party with a clear and credible line on the dominant issue of the day. Labour are split and the Conservatives have leaders who make unachievable promises. It’s the Lib Dems who have the solution.