Lord Ashcroft: CCHQ was right not to spend scarce money in Oldham East and Saddleworth
Two principal questions are preoccupying Conservative commentators about the result from Oldham East & Saddleworth by-election:
- First, was the Liberal Democrat vote share largely due to tactical voting by previous Conservative supporters?
- Second, would a bigger Conservative presence on the campaign trail have made any significant difference to the result?
I decided to find out over the weekend by re-polling 500 of the voters who took part in my pre-election survey (which turned out to be very accurate). The answers to the questions are: yes, and almost certainly not.
The level of tactical voting is very clear. Only just over half (55%) of those who voted Liberal Democrat at the general election stayed with the party last Thursday; 29% went to Labour. Those who voted Conservative in 2010 were mainly responsible for keeping the Lib Dem share looking respectable: fewer than half of those who supported the Conservatives in May did so again at the by-election; a third of them voted for Elwyn Watkins this time.
Several pieces of evidence refute the idea that a lacklustre Conservative campaign caused Tory defections. Nearly half the electors decided how to vote as soon as they knew there would be a by-election, before the campaign started. Those who ended up voting Conservative were only marginally more likely (according to the pre-election poll) to have heard from our campaign than those who did not – indeed, Conservative voters were no more likely to have been visited by a Tory canvasser than voters as a whole.
As I noted in my commentary on the pre-election poll, gaining this seat was never a real prospect for the Conservatives, as local Tory voters could see for themselves. That being the case, to mount a campaign on the scale of Crewe & Nantwich or Norwich North would have been wasteful. Using resources where they can be most effective is an essential for longer term political success, as I have argued since the 2005 general election. There will be campaigns in the remaining four years of this parliament that we can and must win – and you can only spend each pound once.
Comments