It's almost never a case of people 'shifting to vote for the Tories' and always a case of people just not voting, i.e. the numbers don't go up but the percentage in their favour does.
The Tories have always had a maximum vote of about 13-14m, but they've had that even on occasions where Labour has had about the same - there's not really any overlap.
What's interesting when you study the numbers is that there's about 5m Tory voters that consistently vote Tory simply because the papers tell them to - those people voted Labour in '97 when the Sun endorsed Blair, for instance.
It's almost never a case of people 'shifting to vote for the Tories' and always a case of people just not voting, i.e. the numbers don't go up but the percentage in their favour does.
The Tories have always had a maximum vote of about 13-14m, but they've had that even on occasions where Labour has had about the same - there's not really any overlap.
What's interesting when you study the numbers is that there's about 5m Tory voters that consistently vote Tory simply because the papers tell them to - those people voted Labour in '97 when the Sun endorsed Blair, for instance.