tsubaki
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Not this again. Corbyn has held 38-40% in polls for months now - despite the hostility of most of the media, many members of his own party, and the big donors. This is something that is unprecedented in modern British politics.
What are the reasons for this? Well, for a start thanks to decades of abuse journalists and journalism generally are largely held in contempt by the public, so attacks of the kind that once did for Foot and Kinnock progressively have had less and less effect the more they are repeated or the more absurd they get. Media support is still important, but it becomes less important when people don't believe it or are not influenced by it.
Then you come to the PLP, which thanks to reforms about "improving the quality of candidates" during Blair's day has become filled with banal careerists that mostly have no experience of anything, including actual politics, and who were therefore comprehensively smashed in contests they controlled twice. This means that three years of internal opposition has resulted in no obvious rival candidate coming from that source, nor is there likely to be one, nor have they even come up with an alternative programme to rally around. People are less bothered about Labour being split when half of that debate has demonstrated how rubbish they are several times.
Meanwhile the fact Corbyn has been opposed so much has meant that those who voted for him in the first place and those who have joined since are now much more active; CLPs are busier, there are more canvassers and the situation is moving towards a point where CLPs will be able to select their own candidates (which means that the quality of candidates will go up, given that there will actually be contests again) and the worst, most scandal-ridden Labour councils are being gradually dealt with. An accidental effect of this enthusiasm has been that party finances were sorted out early on - which meant in the 2017 manifesto that they were able to suggest policies that people actually liked, rather than those that they could get past donors.
None of those things are likely to go away anytime soon, which means that Corbyn will probably keep around 38-40% of the vote.
Of course May has a similar % of the vote in most polls, but how stable is her support?
Firstly, they are the party of Brexit - but whatever happens next March, that reason for voting for them will no longer exist once a decision is made one way or another. As a result the 2017 Tory voter might not vote for Corbyn, but they are going to be more likely to stay home or vote Lib Dem / UKIP (depending on who is disappointed) than they were in 2017. Secondly they are very reliant on donors; we have all seen who they've been taking money off and what the effect of that money has been on policy development - with the result that there is a severe housing crisis, transport costs are going up, councils are closing down. These are all things that affect people in a much more real way than stories in the media do and they will have even more of an effect at the next election than they did in 2017.
Finally there is the party itself, which has an aging membership and which is not being replaced (even the "doubling of membership" that Lewis announced earlier this year was less than it was in Cameron's day), plus CCHQ has taken over much of the job of selecting Parliamentary candidates - this means that they have fewer advocates and the standard of PPCs have gotten worse (even in the past ten years there has been a notable decline).
