Any kind of win for the Conservatives tomorrow will be a significant achievement

The Shakespeare Report.

Cameron during his 24 hour tour of every part of Britain.

Any kind of win for the Conservatives tomorrow will be a significant achievement. This was never going to be an easy campaign, and no-one should ever have thought changing the government would be a push-over. There has been much (justified) anger from the public that the Liberal Democrats are unlikely to see their popularity reflected in the number of seats gained. But of course the system is also stacked against the Tories, who can be 5% ahead of Labour and yet be the smaller power in Parliament.

And at least the LibDems gain from the loving gaze of the broadcast media, who cannot disguise their excitement at the prospect of a LibDem breakthrough, and are giving Clegg fabulously positive coverage. I don’t suggest for a moment that this is because of any political bias, it’s just they love a good story and the underdog upsetting the apple-cart is the best story of all. Poor old Brown must feel even more sore than Cameron, as his ‘bigotgate’ squirming had to be counted towards his statutory fraction of onscreen time, just as he started making his best speeches.

And while ahead in the polls, Conservatives had to fight the inevitably leveling effect of the debates. They’ve been criticised for accepting the three-party format, a huge unnecessary risk for the one in front. But what else could the party espousing open democracy possibly have done?

Perhaps the worst thing for them was the daily polling, instituted by my own company, YouGov. I make no apology for it: constant public feedback is part of a new, more interactive democracy. And it’s been part of American elections for ages, albeit in a less systematic version. But it’s had the effect of magnifying aspects of the race that many would argue are the least important. Clegg’s performance in the first TV debate was impressive, then the instant YouGov poll declared him the runaway winner immediately afterwards and catapaulted him even more powerfully into the public mind. All attention was on the effect of the next performance, the personality-driven horse-race became everything, all the talk was on Clegg’s agenda of hung parliaments and the unfairness of the system, and real policies hardly mattered.

Finally, there was the hangover from the expenses scandal. Opinion polls had long showed that the public associated the scandals with the two main parties, and thought the LibDems as squeaky innocents. The simplest maths makes this hardly surprising: parties with the most MPs had the most scandals, and so looked worse. Per-MP expenses might have told a different story, but harder to notice.

My guess is that the Conservatives have done enough to make David Cameron Prime Minister, but whether it ends up a hung parliament or not should not disguise the inherent difficulty of this race.

Stephan Shakespeare is CEO of YouGov.