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“I’m a genuine contender for Prime Minister”. So said Jo Swinson, who at the time was Leader of the Liberal Democrats, on 9th November 2019. Swinson’s confidence in her party’s popularity seemed to be justified: her party had come second in June’s EU elections, and the Liberal Democrats had averaged up to 21% in polls in the weeks afterward, often coming close to outpolling Labour. At one point in June, it looked as if the Lib Dems could win over 50 seats and hold the balance of power in a hung parliament.
But on 12th December, the reality was very different. The Lib Dems went backwards, winning just 11 seats (-1) with Swinson losing her own seat – the first time that a Liberal leader had lost their seat since Herbert Asquith in 1918. The party increased its share of the popular vote, but at 12% (+4pts), it was still far short of the 23% that the party won in 2010.
How did this happen? After experiencing depressing results in the 2015 and 2017 general elections, 2019 seemed to be the year that the Lib Dems would finally bounce back. After polling at 10% or less for over six years, the Lib Dems’ popularity rapidly rose in May 2019. From averaging 9% in polls in April, the Lib Dems leapt up to 20% by June (+11pts), almost entirely at the expense of Labour.
The party would have won 53 seats on a universal swing, a gain of 41 seats compared to its 2017 total – this would have been the biggest seat gain achieved by the Liberals since 1923, nearly 100 years ago.
Yet, after average 18-20% in polls for 5 months in a row, the Lib Dems’ support vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared. Between September 2019 and February 2020, the Liberal Democrats’ support collapsed from 19% back to 9% - exactly what it was in April 2019.
Their estimated seat total, meanwhile, has fallen from an impressive 53 seats to just 8 seats – the same number of seats that they won in 2015. Indeed, within England and Wales, the party would win just 5 seats – fewer than in 2015.
Why did this happen? How did it all go so wrong?
Well, I would say that there were three main reasons for the Lib Dems’ failure in 2019.
Ambiguity
The primary reason was a failure to adequately articulate their main policy: being anti-Brexit. The Lib Dems’ whole campaign was structured around their pledge to revoke Article 50 if they won a majority. But this bold pledge was undermined by two facts.
First, everyone knew that the Lib Dems were never going to win a majority, so this promise was undermined from the start. In November 2019, just 6% of voters thought that a Lib Dem majority could realistically happen. As it was obvious that the Lib Dems were never going to win a majority, the party also promised to support a referendum if they did not win a majority, and to revoke Article 50 if they did win a majority (an outcome that virtually everyone agreed was impossible). So if you wanted an EU referendum, but did not want to revoke Article 50 without a referendum, you would have to vote Lib Dem… but hope that they didn’t win.
Confused yet? I don’t blame you. The Lib Dems’ EU policy thus suffered from the very thing that they had spent 6 months criticising Labour for: ambiguity, uncertainty and confusion.
Second, the Labour Party adopted a clear and unambiguous policy of holding a 2nd referendum on an improved Brexit deal. This polarised the election even further between Labour (promising a 2nd referendum) and the Conservatives (promising Brexit). At the same time, Remain voters actually preferred Labour’s Brexit policy (64% approved) to the Lib Dems’ policy (55% approved). So, since virtually everyone agreed that the Lib Dems could not win, and since Labour’s Brexit policy was slightly more popular amongst Remainers, it would seem to make logical sense for Remainers to support Labour.
And that is exactly what they did. Between September 2019 and the general election, the Lib Dems’ monthly poll average amongst Remainers fell from 34% to 21% (-13pts), with Labour rising from 36% to 49% (+13pts). This led to the Lib Dems falling from an overall poll average of 19% to 12% (-7pts) in the general election.
The Lib Dems’ strategy of winning most Remain voters was thus a complete failure, both due to their opponents’ strategic decisions and the Lib Dems’ own missteps.
Overconfidence
The second major reason was that the Lib Dems were massively overconfident. Despite only winning 12 seats and 7% of the vote in 2017, the party set their sights far too high. Even when they were polling over 20%, their estimated seat total barely exceeded 50 seats; their 2015 defeat had been absolutely devastating, and they had somehow managed to lose even more votes in 2017. They needed to rebuild the party and win back seats that they had narrowly lost. Yet at one point, Chuka Ummuna was arguing that the Lib Dems could win up to 200 seats. This would have been the largest seat gain (+112) by the Liberals since the Liberal landslide of 1906, over a century ago.
The idea that they could have made such gains in 2019 is laughable.
Yet in 2019, instead of focusing on winning seats that they had only narrowly lost in 2017, the party focused an enormous amount of time and energy on seats that they simply could not realistically win. As a result, their vote rose significantly in unwinnable seats like Kensington (+9pts), Wokingham (+22pts) and Somerset North East (+14pts) – but their vote share fell in seats that they had actually won in 2017, such as North Norfolk (-18pts), Dunbartonshire East (-4pts) and Eastbourne (-6pts) all of which the party lost.
The failure of the Lib Dems’ targeting strategy is demonstrated by two facts. Firstly, of the eight seats that the Lib Dems won in 2015, the party won just two of them in 2019. Secondly, the Lib Dems underperformed relative to their overall share of the vote. On a universal swing, the Lib Dems would have won 19 seats (+7) after increasing their vote share by 4pts, yet in the general election they only won 11 (-1). This compares to 2017, when they overperformed their overall vote share and won 12 seats (+4) instead of the 5 seats (-3) that they would have won on a universal swing.
In short, the party convinced themselves that they could win enough seats to fill the government benches, and as a result they barely ended up winning enough seats to fill a park bench.
Jo Swinson
The final reason for the Lib Dems’ election failure was the Prime Minister-in-waiting herself: Jo Swinson. Despite the assumptions made by many centrists, who thought that their love of Swinson would be shared by the whole country, the more that voters saw of Swinson, the less they liked her. The party’s decision to run a Presidential-style campaign focused on Jo Swinson, even going as far as to label the party “Jo Swinson’s Liberal Democrats” proved to be a very poor strategic choice. Between September and December, the percentage of voters who disapproved of her performance rose from 34% to 49% (+15pts), whilst her net approval rating fell from -7pts (September) to -27pts (December).
For comparison, even Jeremy Corbyn’s net approval rating improved between September 2019 (-45pts) and December 2019 (-37pts). But Jo Swinson’s got worse.
Conclusion
With Brexit having happened, and the Lib Dems’ sole policy having thus become redundant, it is difficult to see where the party goes next.
What is the party’s purpose now, if not to be anti-Brexit? Can it move on from the Conservative/Lib Dem Coalition even as it is set to elect another Coalition Minister as its leader?
These questions are for the Lib Dems to answer. But there is one thing that we do know for sure, and that is that ultimately the Lib Dems failed in 2019 because they over-estimated their popularity. If the party wants to return to power, it should recognise a simple truth: most people simply do not like them.
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