YouGov show a 12% swing in key marginals
Channel 4 news has a new YouGov poll of marginal seats. The poll covered Labour held Conservative target seats that require a swing between 3% and 7% to capture, the logic being that those "low hanging fruit" are certain Conservative gains in the present environment, so the battleground becomes those seats the Conservatives need to win to obtain an overall majority.
It showed support of CON 45%, LAB 32%, LDEM 13%, which suggests a swing to the Conservatives of 12 percent, enough to easily capture all these seats and, if one assume they are doing as well in more distant marginals - not necessarily a given - would suggest a Conservative majority of around 150. There is also an attempt to estimate what the effect of tactical voting might be - people were also asked how they would vote if they thought only Labour or the Conservatives could win in their seat. This reduces the swing to 10.5%, suggesting there is still some anti-Conservative tactical voting in these seats by Liberal Democrat supporters.
Other questions in the survey (the full results are here) asked the 59% of people who recorded a negative opinion of Brown why people had such a low opinion, the most popular answers were that he was out of touch (66%), indecisive (60%), incompetent (52%) and gloomy (50%). Asked what he could do to improve their opinion of him, taking more radical steps to protect people from the economic crisis (44%) was the most popular answer, followed by being more frank and honest (37%). 33% said none of the things suggested would improve their opinion of Brown.
David Cameron is interestingly still seen as a lightweight by 55% of people, but at the same time, people clearly don't thing this is a major problem, as 71% have a positive opinion of how he is doing his job.
Turning to the state of the economy, only a minority (29%) blame the government for causing the problems, but they do seem to think the government's reaction has been ineffective or counter-productive. Only 12% think the actions Gordon Brown has taken, or is planning, will improve maters. 24% think they will make things worse. 75% think the government are out of touch with how the economic problems are impacting ordinary people
Finally the survey asked about Gordon Brown's future and potential leadership challenges. Perhaps surprisingly a majority of people did not want Gordon Brown to stand down as Labour leader, with 53% wanting him to stay until the election. Jack Straw and David Miliband were, as usual, the favoured replacements for Brown but, as usual, tiny proportions named them (14% and 12% respectively) with most saying don't know. Asked to compare Gordon Brown and David Cameron, and David Miliband and Gordon Brown, the only really significant difference was in the level of don't knows.
