Some people say Theresa May has lost some support since after the bomb blast. Is this true do you think?
As has been noted by others, it's difficult to separate out what has caused any changes in popularity from the issues over the Tory manifesto and May's bad performance in campaigning but your question triggers a number of thoughts.
First of all, the real question is about Tory popularity. While there was an attempt to make this some form of Presidential election by the Tories to start with, it isn't though some such as jakswan and gonnagle on here seem confused enough to think it is. It would be an incorrect but at least arguable notion with some form of proportional electoral system but under FPTP, it's simply wrong.
Next, any change in popularity from the opinion polls was mainly between weekly polls where the factor of the farce over the social care policy was not reflected till this week. Added to that that there was a trend for the polls to be narrowing and it is difficult to understand the impact of the murders in Manchester. That said, the expectation was that the murders would be beneficial for the Tories in that security issues are in general better for the incumbent as there is a preference for a 'strong and stable' continuity and also, in general, the Tories have managed to portray themselves as the law and order party. The immediate raising and now lowering of the terror thread level, and the the apparent information that the murderer had been reported several times by people, though may not have been seen as an indication of competence that is needed. One of the issues here for May specifically is that having been Home Secretary for the years before she became PM, any failings will be seen as her responsibility.
The choice to run this as a vote for May rather than a vote for the Tories, to the extent that the battle bus referred to May, and various candidates put out leaflets with no pictures of themselves just May, and referred to themselves as May's candidate, was apart from being constitutionally illiterate, a mistake IMO for a number of reasons. First it is a high risk policy since it takes only a few mistakes to dissolve that idea of confidence, secondly it was started from a high water mark so could to an extent only go down, third that high water mark was not evidenced by much actual campaigning. May had practically avoided campaigning in Brexit and there was no indication that she was a barnstorming politician on the campaign trail. Indeed the coddling and hiding her from actual appearances with real people from the start of the campaign indicates that this was known and that somehow they (Lynton Crosby) has decided to play to a weakness.
The weakness was compounded by making the election, called for purely party political reasons and a waste of time and money, by someone who had said they weren't going to do so, immediately making then a liar, and in the justifications given for the waste, a lying hypocrite. The need to keep it a surprise to somehow put the opposition onto the back foot meant that there was no real plan for the election and lead to not enough voices being involved in the manifesto leading to the farce that was the social care policy. I am sure it sounded like a good idea in that it could be portrayed as being something that might appeal to Labour voters but it's disjunct from health care policy which meant that it could be called a dementia tax (and whoever came up with that phrase deserves a nod) was indicative of policy on the hoof. When you are trying to run as strong and stable, there is little you can do worse than this sort of ill thought out policy, particularly when you havene actually got the agreement of your own cabinet, nevermind the party on this.
Further evidence of this lack of thinking and planning comes from the calling of the election, already being done for purely party reasons and on the basis of a lie, with the aim to get a large majority, on what I think were three hopes which were only going to work under a perfect wind. These three hopes were reducing UKIP to an irrelevance by getting the vast majority of votes to go Tory, what could be portrayed as a 'successful resurgence' in Scotland thus reducing the possibility of independence and scrutiny by the SNP in Westminster, and reducing the Labour Party to a rump.
Now looking at these individually, they were all perfectly achievable but there is a bit of the fox, chicken and corn logic problem when you look at them in more detail, something that due to the lack of planning and groupthink they didn't do.
First, making the UKIP vote smaller, and getting the votes must have seemed like a no brained. They simply had to say Brexit means Brexit, moan a bit about Juncker and say Corbyn was weak. This though is where the joke of the social care policy is on them. The UKIP vote is demographically older and fed on a diet of Daily Mail dementia and cancer stories. This then pushes some votes of UKIP to the Labour party thereby negating the third aim.
The second plank also seems incredibly easy in that it would effectively been achieved if the SNP got less than the 56 seats they gained in a set of almost unrepeatable circumstances and the stories got 1 more seat doubling their sears to a whole 2 in Scotland. Thus for Ruth and the Plastic PopulationThe Only Way Wiz Up! Again this is in that aim likely to be achieved but it also needed the vast majority of the elderly once Labour vote. Having managed to screw this up, my feeling is that they have taken the Scottish Labour Party which was on life support and about to become a moribund corpse, restarted its heart and given it the kiss of life.
This leads to the third aim , and where they made a mistake in changing the logic which was of benefit in the first two parts completely around. UKIP and the SNP were both starting from their own high water mark positions so in effect, any advance was hugely unlikely for them. For Labour and Corbyn though the opposite was true, and as already covered May's own popularity, something that they obviously knew was problematic, the only way was down. Any neutral watching PMQs would, I think, agree that neither May nor Corbyn are adept at it but most people aren't watching it and putting up May vs Corbyn as a general election bout was only likely to make Corbyn look good because the Tories had lowered expectations so far that he could only exceed them. In addition, Corbyn had won two elections to be leader of the Labour Party by large majorities, while May had got the Tory leadership by winning only amongst the MPs after a number of candidates had shot one and other. Mistakenly, they thought he had won those only by those voting having drunk the kool aid.
There is still a week and a half to go and we have to see what the vote actually is but if the Tories do not get a large majority on the wasteful election they called, by making their leader a liar, then their hypocritical hubris will be to blame
