The centre ground’s there for the taking

YouGov recently repeated its occassional exercise of asking people where they’d place themselves, the parties and the leaders on the left-right spectrum. Anthony Wells reported some of the findings on Saturday: Cameron is seen as slightly less right-wing than his party, while both the Tories and Labour appear to have moved away from the centre-ground since the election.

One thing these YouGov numbers allow us to do is see where on the spectrum the parties get their support from. First, how people voted in 2010 and then how they say they’d vote now:

This looks broadly as you’d expect, with Labour dominating among left-wing voters and the Tories doing likewise on the right. It does seem, though, that Labour have more to gain on the left (where there are more “undecided”s, “other”s or “wouldn’t vote”s) than the Tories do on the right. And it demonstrates just how much there is to play for in the centre.