No one wants to fight a national campaign. This will be the least general election in years

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[/audioplayer]There’s normally an easy way to tell which party is losing a general election campaign. Whenever one side starts telling you to ignore the national polls and look at what is happening in certain key seats, it is a sure sign that they are in deep trouble. In this election, however, all the parties are arguing that what’s going on in their target seats matters more than the national polls. No one is keener to dispute the relevance of the national polls than the Liberal Democrats. To demonstrate that they’ll still matter after the next election — particularly if there is another hung parliament — they’ve taken to sharing details of their own internal polling. The polls they’re sharing suggest that their vote is holding up far better in their own constituencies than it is nationally, where it is down to a single-figure percentage.