Conservatives and Lib Dems will hold each other's target seats

The Tories are in a good position to get an overall majority despite the surge in support for the Lib dems based on current polls. Using the 2005 notional results based on boundary changes data provided at UK Polling Report I believe the Tories can get as low as 35% providing Labour is 29.5% or less based on a seat by seat assessment of the swing impact. I have based this assessment on Conservatives not gaining any Lib Dem seats, Others (SNP, Independent etc) holding. I would upload the spreadsheet but blogger does not seem to allow that.

Labour are currently polling only 27% according to UKPollingReport. That is before the disastrous B.I.G.O.T. comments. Brown Is Gone On Thursday!

A UK polling report commentary on a Guardian poll of Lib Dem target seats suggests that the Lib Dems will not take their Tory target seats but will take more Labour target seats.

It gets more interesting though if you look seperately at the Conservative-held LibDem targets, and the Labour-held LibDem targets. As Julian Glover rightly warns in his commentary, only 15 of these seats are Labour held so the sample size isn’t huge and some caution is necessary, but it appears to show that the Lib Dem advance in marginals is wholly concentrated in Labour held ones: taken separately, responses in Con-v-LD seats shows no discernable swing to the Liberal Democrats, but a swing of about 8 points in Lab-v-LD seats. That would result in the Lib Dems taking about 28 or so seats from Labour, but few if any from the Conservatives. If this finding is at all accurate, it will be key to the result

I have read elsewhere that the Lib Dem vote is holding up in Tory target seats currently held by Lib Dem. This is certainly consistent with my own involvement which suggests we are extremely confident of taking Reading West from Labour whilst Zac Goldsmith in Richmond is less likely to win against the incumbent Lib Dem Margaret Kramer.

So a week out I think the media are busy slamming Labour and are not particularly open at recognising the likelihood of a Conservative majority. There is more money for the media in talking up a hung parliament.