Where have UKIP gone?

Friday 20th June

There was a point when UKIP were the only show in town; when the smiling face of Mr. Farage was everywhere, on the telly and in the papers it was all Ukip.  And actually it almost all was based on the persona of that one man.  And now nothing.  May be he is having a well-deserved rest – a holiday perhaps.  And like some sort of summer madness the whole of the Press has moved on.  The World Cup and Iraq are squeezing any mention of politics out of the way.  Which may not be a bad thing.  But where have all those Ukip voters gone.  Just because there isn’t an election they haven’t disappeared.  Have they?  Well, if opinion polls tell us anything their vote has slipped back.  Or rather the people who were prepared to think the unthinkable and say they would vote for them if there was an election tomorrow have diminished somewhat.  According to the polls their vote is now around 13 or 14%.  Higher incidentally than the LibDems.  But I wonder what is really happening.

There are only about 60% of the electorate who actually go out and vote at all, and there is no reliable way of excluding the unlikely to vote from the numbers.  If you are (un)lucky enough to be asked, which I never have been, by a pollster, are you going to be honest and say that actually you probably wont vote anyway.  Secondly there is a core vote for both Labour and the Tories of around 30% who will vote that way always; they wouldn’t dream of voting anything else, no matter how badly the party is doing.  Thirdly there is a long-term trend of the big two parties losing support.  Call it voter fatigue, or a plague on both your houses, or simply the belief that they are both pretty incompetent.  Fourthly the first past the post system means that an MP can easily be elected with only about a third of the electorate in that seat voting for them.  This means that many votes are wasted; in essence any vote over 50% for your favoured candidate will not help them in any way.  So the opinion pollsters all try to use demographics to work out how these raw percentages will translate into seats. And they are always wrong.  Most campaigns don’t actually change things that much either.  The next nine months are the crunch time to shift public opinion, if that is even at all possible.  But I wonder just how much air-time Mr. Farage will get between now and the starting gun in early April, and where the polls will be then because nothing breeds success like success.  If people think they (or anyone else) is winning they are more likely to vote for them.