Chris Hanretty

I’m still trying to find out whether deluded former Communist voters switched to the Lega. Two points from today’s Repubblica:

1. “The Sinistra Arcobaleno has lost something like 2,395,932 votes compared to 2006. Bertinotti and co have seen almost 61.5% of the savings they have cashed in in 2006 disappeared. And, more worrying, this figure is the same across all the country, from north to south“.
2. The bullet-like prose of Ilvo Diamanti: “of every 10 elecftors of the radical left, less than three remained faithful, 2 voted for the PD+IdV, following the call of the “useful vote”. Half of them, instead, divided equally between abstention and other political formations. Fewfor the extreme left; most for the right. For the PdL, in the Mezzogiorno. For the Lega, in many zones of the North“.

So, there’s an effect there, but we don’t know how big it is. Diamanti’s data comes from Ipsos, who in turn used an ecological regression, presumably on heavily disaggregated data - so in principle the findings can be replicated.