Much has been made of the battle in the Labour Party between going for a core vote strategy and aiming for a ‘broad church’ electorate at this year’s election. But what do we mean when we say core vote?

We often have strong preconceptions. For the Labour Party, we think of trade unionists and the working class. And thinking of the Conservative Party’s core vote conjures up images of aristocrats and small businesses.

But closer inspection often brings these preconceptions crashing to the ground. The 'Tory Benn' idea illustrates that actually many of those with the most privileged backgrounds often become staunch Labourites: as Richard Reeves of Demos recently said: “There is nothing like the British establishment to feed the anti-establishment.”

Going the other way is equally complicated. Despite her middle class base Margaret Thatcher was also popular with large swathes of the working class. And in contemporary politics this picture becomes all the more jumbled. What, for example, is the core vote of the Liberal Democrats? Or the Greens?

In this month’s Total Politics, Andrew Hawkins, the chief executive of one of Britain’s largest polling companies ComRes, talks about the actual process of defining a core vote, and the inaccuracies that go with the territory.

There are, apparently, two key ways of defining the core vote. Firstly, you can look at party identification and then match it up with their socio-economic background. Secondly, we can look at past vote history. But, as Hawkins points out, neither of these are exact sciences, The notion of the core vote remains one of those many terms in politics that everyone thinks they understand. But really these definitions don’t quite match up.