Nick Clegg is on course to be saved from defeat in his Sheffield Hallam constituency by a tide of Tory tactical votes, according to a special Guardian/ICM poll conducted in the deputy prime minister’s constituency.

The poll puts Clegg on 42%, seven points clear of his young Labour rival, Oliver Coppard, who is on 35%. Ian Walker, the candidate for the Conservatives, is on 12%.

But Clegg achieves his seven-point lead only because almost half the people (48%) who say their nationwide preference is for the Conservatives are planning to support the Lib Dem leader.

When ICM asked voters which party they would prefer if they put the local context and candidates out of mind, Labour is ahead on 34%, with the Lib Dems on 32% and the Conservatives on 21%.

The result contrasts with other recent constituency polls in this prosperous pocket of South Yorkshire, which sprawls out to the west beyond Sheffield into the Peak District.

These all suggested that Clegg was on course for a narrow defeat at Labour’s hands. Lord Ashcroft, for example, produced a poll last week that put Labour a single point ahead of the Lib Dems, after respondents had been asked to think about their own constituency.

But Ashcroft did not identify candidates – and the Clegg name seems crucial to drawing extra support from the Conservative fold in a seat that has been Tory for most of its 130-year history.



Martin Boon, of ICM Unlimited, said: “Some caution is needed because some of the sub-samples involved here are small, but this looks like evidence of Tory tactical voting to save Nick Clegg – and on a breathtaking scale.”



The telephone fieldwork took place over a weekend in which the deputy prime minister went further than previously in signalling his willingness to go into a fresh coalition with the Conservatives, by clarifying that he did not regard the Conservative demand for an in/out referendum on the European Union as a red line in negotiations.

But, in a seat that has never returned a Labour MP and where Labour scored a mere 13.5% of the vote in Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, there are some crumbs of comfort for Coppard in the detail of the data.

On the raw results, before adjustment for voters who are likely to make it to the polling station, Coppard and Clegg are running neck and neck. It is the greater propensity for Clegg’s voters to say they will definitely show up and vote that propels him into the lead.

Following the initial adjustment, ICM gives Clegg a lead of four points: Clegg is on 40% and Coppard on 36%.

ICM then made a second adjustment, which assumes – in keeping with its practice in its nationwide opinion polls – that a proportion of voters who won’t say or don’t know who they will support will go back to the party they backed last time.

Because Clegg starts out with an outright majority of the local vote in 2010, this adjustment is helpful to Clegg. ICM concludes that this boosts his vote to 42%, leaving him seven points clear.

Election night will confirm whether this adjustment, which has worked well in predictions in nationwide elections, holds good in the Hallam seat.



Without the second adjustment, the Lib Dem advantage is sufficiently narrow that it is on the edge of the margin of error. It is also the sort of difference that Labour might have hoped to overturn by an energetic campaign to turn out the vote.



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The contentment of local Conservatives with Clegg also came through when all voters were pressed on which party they would never vote for. Overall, 52% of all those surveyed said they would never back the Tories, 39% said they would never vote Labour, and just 32% said they would never back the Lib Dems.

Tory voters are no more allergic to Lib Dem voters than the electorate as a whole, of whom 32% also said they would never vote for the party led by Clegg.

Clegg’s personal ratings are better on his home patch than in the national polls: overall 48% believe he is doing a good job, five points more than the 43% who believe he is doing badly.

That five-point net positive rating is less than David Cameron’s +14 among Hallam voters, but better than Ed Miliband’s -12 and Nigel Farage’s -20. But none of the national politicians, Clegg included, fare as well as Coppard who scores +19.

Hallam’s voters would slightly prefer a Labour-led government – even one that relied on support from other parties – to a Conservative-led one, by 48% to 45%.





ICM Unlimited interviewed a random sample of 501 adults by telephone in the political constituency of Sheffield Hallam on 1 May to 3 May 2015. Interviews were conducted across the constituency and the results have been weighted to the profile of all adults living there. ICM is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.