ABSTRACT
Labour's victory in the 1997 general election illustrates the point that party fortunes are often unrelated to political forecasts. In the wake of its 1992 defeat, some observers pondered the question of whether Labour had squandered its 'last chance' (Heath et al., 1994). Subsequently, even after Labour's stock in public opinion polls soared, and the Conservatives repeatedly demonstrated their apparent determination to dissipate their remaining political capital, few media pundits or academic commentators dared to predict an outright Labour victory. Caution about Labour's prospects persisted even as its new leader, Tony Blair, prepared the party to take advantage of its best opportunity in years. In the event, Labour scored the largest triumph for a party in any general election since World War Two. Although post-election analysts have quickly catalogued many factors that might be responsible for this remarkable reversal of political fortune (see, for example, Geddes and Tonge, 1997; Norris and Gavin, 1997; King, 1998a), we contend that a proper starting point for understanding Labour's landslide should be voters' evaluations of the parties, their leaders, and their policies. These evaluations help us to understand the choices that voters made on 1 May, and the gales of political change that blew the Conservatives out of office after nearly two decades in power.
