The Lib Dems in a hung Parliament
On his blog Iain Dale has a presentation from a Lib Dem conference last spring that included some polling on attitudes towards coalitions. As the third party the media don't often commission interesting polling stuff about the Lib Dems, so it's nice to have some. Sadly he only has the presentation from a discussion session about hung Parliaments, and not the polling update from Chris Rennard that was promised for the following morning, but there goes!
The presentation includes the results of questions about the effect knowing or thinking (it's sadly not made clear exactly what the question wording was) that the Lib Dems would form a coalition with David Cameron and the Conservatives or Gordon Brown and Labour would have on people's likelihood to vote Lib Dem. In both cases just under 4/10 people said it would make no difference.
Overall the figures were not hugely different. 29% of people would be more likely to vote Lib Dem if they were going into coalition with the Tories, 31% less likely. 30% more likely if they were headed into coalition with Labour, 25% less likely.
Broken down by party, unsurprisingly if the Lib Dems allied themselves with Labour Conservative supporters would be drastically less likely to support them - 61% would be less likely, including 38% who would be "much less likely". There is a mirror image for Labour supporters - 59% of whom would be less likely if the Lib Dems allied themselves with the Tories. No surprises there, though it underlines the importance for the Lib Dems of maintaining a neutral stance, there are plenty of supporters of both other parties who vote tactically for the Lib Dems to keep the other one out, and they can't afford to alienate half of them.
More interestingly, amongst current Lib Dem supporters attitudes are far more positive towards a Brown alliance than a Cameron one. 34% of current Lib Dem supporters would be more likely to vote for the party if they allied themselves with Brown, with 24% against. Only 23% were more likely to vote for the party if they allied themselves with Cameron, while 34% were against.
An important caveat is that the polling is a year out of date now, so public attitudes towards David Cameron and Gordon Brown have probably changed. The Lib Dem presentation goes on to make the sound point that even if there is a hung Parliament, the decision will probably be made by the Parliamentary arithmatic, but
- back in Spring 2007 at least - it looks as though Lib Dem supporters would have been much happier to see their party supporting a Brown government rather than a Cameron one.
