At a time when the Labour and Conservative parties are worried about the big fall in their support, the Liberal Democrats are enjoying the relative advantage of going nowhere. Their August support in the polls, 13.6 percent, is only one percent higher than their vote at last year's general election. While the Lib Dems predicted share of seats is 8 down on the 72 seats won last July, it is a much better showing than Labour, which currently stands to lose hundreds of seats, and the Conservatives, threatened with winning fewer seats than the Liberal Democrats.
Monthly support for the Liberal Democrats has fluctuated within a band so narrow that may simply be due to sampling fluctuations around its median of 13.1 percent in March. The party's support reached a relative high of 14.4 percent in July this year, and was at a relative low of 11.7 percent last August. Predicted seats have fluctuated too between 73 seats in January and 60 seats in April.
At the general election, the Liberal Democrats took dozens of seats by gaining support from Conservatives unhappy with the government and from Labour voters who turned to the Lib Dems as the party offering the best chance of turfing out the Tories. Now the situation is different. Reform is taking lots more votes from the Tories augmented by some Labour and a few Lib Dem votes. Electoral Calculus reckons that this will enable Reform to take nine seats from the Liberal Democrats by jumping from third to first in select constituencies, while the Liberal Democrats take one seat from the Conservatives.
There is a one in ten chance that the Liberal Democrats could win an additional 23 seats, gaining 18 seats from the Conservatives and 5 seats from Labour, and not exchanging any seats with Reform. However, there is also a one in ten chance that the party could lose 33 seats to Reform, 9 to the Conservatives and 1 to the SNP. While being reduced to 29 Lib Dem MPs would be a big setback, it would still leave the party with more than double the MPs it had in the 2019 Parliament.
In a hung Parliament in which no party has a majority, Liberal Democrat MPs could have a critical position in arithmetical calculations of forming a government. However, since the Lib Dems are a left-of-centre party, politics stands in the way of joining forces with Reform UK in a coalition government. While a combination of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs might add up to a political majority. It would mean the party linking up with a Labour Party that had lost up to 150 MPs.
If the next general election meant that Liberal Democrat MPs held the balance of power, the simplest thing for the party to do would be to vote against either a Labour or a Conservative government, thereby precipitating a second election a few months later.
Prof Richard Rose, University of Strathclyde, is currently writing a book entitled "The Disruption of the British Party System".