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Jo Swinson just can’t admit that the Lib Dems’ dodgy poll isn’t a vote winner

Oonagh Keating. Updated November 5th, 2019

In an effort to encourage people to use tactical voting in the upcoming general election, the Liberal Democrats shared a graph supposedly showing that they could unseat Jacob Rees-Mogg, providing Labour supporters in his constituency helped out.

At a glance, it certainly looks as though the Lib Dems are in a good position to cause a severe upset to the Tories, but there was smallprint.

Because that smallprint does what it says on the tin, here’s what it tells us about the question used in the poll.

“Imagine that the result in your constituency was expected to be very close between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidate, and none of the other parties were competitive. In this scenario, which party would you vote for?”

A quick squint at Wikipedia shows that, far from having almost a third of the vote at the last election, which is the impression the graph gives, the Liberal Democrats’ eight per cent wasn’t even a tenth.

The misleading graph was slammed on Twitter.

Sky’s Sophy Ridge questioned Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson on the issue, but got nowhere.

The interview prompted Labour’s Emily Thornberry to post this summary.

Someone named @culturalmarxist applied Lib Dem logic to Jo Swinson’s complaints about not being included in ITV’s head-to-head debate.

There should probably be some small print.

Source: Twitter, Image: BathNES Lib Dems, Sophy Ridge on Sunday

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