Labour's lost 2005 voters

Over on Political Betting someone accidentally linked to last month's Populus tables thinking they were for today's poll. However, in doing so they've highlighted a fascinating question that I missed at the time.

In last month's survey Populus found that 53% of people who said they voted Labour in 2005 would vote Labour in an election tomorrow. They then asked the other 47% to say, in their own words, why not.

The most popular answers were along the lines of it being time for a change, Labour having been in office for too long or having run out of steam - this reason was given by 17% of people. This is the drip-drip cost of government, over time they get tired, and people get tired of them. It's hard (though not impossible) for a government to renew itself and look fresh again while in office.

Joint top on 17% were reasons connected with the poor economy, unemployment, too much borrowing, etc. This is more interesting - if that is a major reason for Labour's previous drop in support, it makes sense that as economic optimism has recovered we are now seeing a shift back towards Labour in voting intention.

Third, with 14%, was Gordon Brown himself. Not much more we can add there.

Those were the big three reasons, and only ones that got over 5% - the total sample of former Labour voters was only 162, so we can't really even rank them, those are just the big three things that people claim have driven them from Labour.

Other reasons that were were mentioned were immigration (3%), Labour "not being for ordinary people anymore" (3%), too soft on crime (2%), defence (2%) amd expenses (1%). Only 1% said they had abandoned Labour because they were impressed with another party or party leader.

As a caveat, it's worth remembering that people aren't always very good at accurately identifying the causes of their own opinions and attitudes (for example, we know packaging makes a massive difference when selling groceries, but I bet you'd get very few people who consciously explain their buying decisions on the grounds of it being in a pretty coloured box), so don't take this as gospel. It does fit nicely with economic optimism being a factor in Labour's recent recovery though.