Coming to the experts, so to speak: why did Labour do so badly ?

[Denzil_DC]

6. Labour internal polls showed they were consistently behind the Tories, contrary to the public polls.

Labour leadership thought public polls were too optimistic

Labour's election pollster says public polls "showed a much more favourable position for Labour than we were finding in our internal data" both before the campaign and during it.

James Morris, who worked for Labour from when Ed Miliband was elected leader in 2010 until the election last week, told Newsnight that while "the lead in the public polls suggested Labour had got past the issues that sunk the party in 2010 - its record on the economy and immigration - we knew we had much more work to do and were still dogged by a loss of trust."

...

"While the public polls had Labour ahead until the spring of this year, in our polls cross-over [when the Tories overtook them] came right after conference season in 2014. A four-point Labour lead in early September turned into a tie in October, followed by small Tory leads prompting the party to put reassurance on fiscal policy and immigration at the heart of the campaign launch."

These polls, which were unpublished and prepared for Labour, suggested that this plan had worked through the opening weeks of the campaign.

Labour had, they suggested, pulled ahead in the English marginals following Mr Miliband's performances in the debates and after the announcement about non-doms. The final poll of the campaign in late April, however, "told a different story".

Mr Morris said: "As focus groups showed the SNP attacks landing, we had Labour behind in the marginal seats." This was, he said, despite the fact that "a public poll in a similar set of seats at the same time showed a three-point Labour lead".

...

He continued: "The campaign strongly toughened our stance on the SNP before the final Question Time [TV appearance for Mr Miliband], but it was not enough. The Tories successfully used the fear of Scottish influence as a way of catalyzing pre-existing doubts about Labour in a way that had not been possible earlier in the campaign. Labour's unexpected post-referendum collapse in Scotland transformed the election across the whole of Great Britain."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32606713

So a number of factors were at play, the demonizing of the SNP (which Labour played along with rather than countering) being an easy one to plump for if you're looking for glib explanations. Whether or not that was a decisive factor, something else would most likely have been. Focusing on the SNP's role (How dare they campaign hard on the basis that they'll do their utmost to serve the interests of their electorate?!) sidesteps the more telling issue of trust, epitomized by the late re-emergence of Cameron waving Liam Byrne's "I’m afraid there is no money" note. I'm highly skeptical of Morris's claim above that "Labour had got past the issues that sunk the party in 2010."

However, the SNP is hardly likely to have been a factor in the concurrent English local elections, where Labour also did badly, whereas I'd normally expect an anti-incumbency vote at local level at this stage in the election cycle. It looks more like the Tories managed to hive off any such backlash to the Lib Dems:

:large


I don't think you can run an effective campaign on the basis that "Our opponents are right, don't vote for them!"

This stretches from buckling under UKIP's and the Tories' scaremongering focus on immigration,



to the continued fetish for austerity while the deficit continues to balloon, to Ed Balls saying he wouldn't change anything in the Conservatives' budget.