Campaigning to win to Ashford
April 22, 2010
A sentence often uttered by political commentators at election time is that you should take all opinion polls with a large pinch of salt. Any poll that promotes their candidate or party is strongly pushed; any poll that makes for bad reading is often disregarded. This is why the ‘poll of polls’ is so important. Polling organisations use so many different methods; telephone, email, face to face – and they use different sample sizes from 1002 up to 2504 (the odd numbers are often to help with rounding). Therefore, combining all the polls and taking an average generally gives you a semi decent guide of how things might turn out.
So, clearly, I’m chuffed to bits that Nick Clegg has come out of the second debate with extremely strong readings. I feared, regardless of the debate, that having built Nick Clegg up over the last week, he was destined for a fall. That fall did not happen. Out of five ‘instant polls’ Clegg won three and came second in two. As an average Nick Clegg was tied with David Cameron; both men were clearly ahead of Brown. Brown did Ok to be fair, he couldn’t do much worse, but the sustained Lib Dem bounce is important because the first voters will do just that, vote, in a matter of days. The postal vote means that people will be voting very shortly and, if they are in any way swayed by the media narrative, the Liberal Democrats are set for a big boost.
Regarding Ashford in particular, we have 10,000 postal voters, more than a sixth of the voting electorate. We’ve delivered a personal letter to many of them and our election address (a free leaflet delivered by Royal Mail) is set to arrive the day before postal votes arrive (I have not rigged this by the way, for whatever reason the Royal Mail have decided to send my leaflets last, after the Greens, Conservative and Labour parties).
I’ve also had a stroke of luck with the local media. I’ve been stuck in the US on business this week thanks to an Icelandic volcano. This event, and my regular conversations with one of the leading local journalists, has meant I received seven pages of coverage this week and took the front page.
Volunteers are flooding in, posters are being erected all over the constituency, I’ve got two solid weeks of meeting and greeting. The gap is large but I am fighting this election to win. I’m looking to cause one of the greatest electoral defeats in modern times – can we do it? – Yes, we can.
