Election 2005: Dartford Constituency - Background

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Nationally the last election result (7 June 2001) was very similar to the 1997 result:

	Seats Won	Gain/Loss	Percentage	Share of vote
Labour	412	-6	40.7%	-2.5%
Conservative	166	+1	31.7%	+1.0%
Liberal Democrat	52	+6	18.3%	+1.5%
Others	29	+1	9.3%	0.0%

When pollsters talk about the "swing" (usually between Conservative and Labour) they mean the change in the percentage share of the poll. This is arrived at by halving the change in the percentage of the two parties; thus Labour was 12.5% ahead in 1997, but only 9% ahead in 2001. The difference in share is 3.5% and the swing will therefore be 1.75% to the Conservatives. The swing is a useful concept, but is never uniform as the case of Dartford shows. In the last election here the swing to the Conservatives was only 0.5%, and in Hartley the county council results of the same day suggest there may even have been a small swing to Labour here. In 2001 the result in Dartford was:

Candidate	Party	Vote	Share
Howard Stoate	Labour	21,466	48.0%
Bob Dunn	Conservative	18,160	40.6%
Graham Morgan	LibDem	3,781	8.5%
Mark Croucher	UKIP	989	2.2%
Keith Davenport	Fancy Dress	344	0.8%

The current difference between the parties is 7.4% which means the Conservatives need a 3.8% swing to take the seat - so any national opinion poll putting Labour ahead by less than 2% will put the seat in jeopardy. Dartford is a marginal seat, but one Labour could afford to lose and still win a majority nationally. The average of the 10 opinion polls in the week to 24 April puts Labour 6 percent ahead (range 4-10%) of the Conservatives, which would not in the ordinary scheme of things threaten their hold of Dartford.

Latest opinion polls and election news can be seen at http://www.politics.co.uk/ , which is a non partisan site with representatives of all the main parties on the editorial board.