PoliticsHome have put up the Phi5000 results of their daily tracker on most important issues from the last month. I’ve commented on the way the economy is climbing up the list of important issues in Ipsos MORI’s monthly polls, but these show it finally overtaking immigration to be what the Phi5000 panellists see as the most important issue facing the county.
Hard economic issues are generally on the rise, there have been similar rises in the perceived importance of taxation as an issue and, more surprisingly given it really has been off the agenda for a very long time - inflation.
On the way down, immigration is no longer the number one issue: at the start of April around 50% of respondents were naming it as one of the top three issues facing the country, it’s now dropped to 39%. “Soft” issues are also on the decline, it’s most noticable with climate change and the environment. At the beginning of April 19% were naming it as an important issue, that has fallen to 12%. There have been smaller falls in people seeing education and health as important issues.
Looking at the longer term trends from MORI, back at the end of the last Conservative government the big issues were health, unemployment, education crime and Europe. During the Blair years unemployment and Europe gradually disappeared as major issues and immigration and - at times - international terrorism and the war in Iraq topped the poll. Now we appear to be seeing another shift in priorities as the economy takes centre stage.
ICM’s Crewe and Nantwich poll - which I look at here - also heralds two new changes to ICM’s methodology, which will probably be rolling out across their other political polls for the Guardian and Sunday Telegraph.
The first change is to to adjust their targets for past vote weighting to be slightly closer to the actual result of the 2005 election - specifically, the target is now based 80% on the 2005 election results, and 20% on the average recalled vote in ICM’s polls. In theory this will produce results that are slightly better for the Conservatives and Lib Dems and slightly worse for Labour, but in practice it is a very, very minor change. Taking the Crewe and Nantwich poll, the change was not large enough to change the results by a percentage point.
The second change is more interesting. As I discussed before the London election, turnout is actually very challenging to predict and is probably one of the reasons MORI seem to have overestimated Labour’s lead. One of the reasons it is so tricky is that people aren’t very good at predicting their own likelihood to vote. In the UK pollsters normally rely on asking people to rate their likelihood to vote on a scale of 1-10, but this still often produces more people who are 10/10 certain to vote than actually do. ICM’s new approach seems to draw some lessons from the more complex approaches taken in the USA where pollsters take into account not just people’s own estimates of their likelihood to vote, but also attitudinal factors like their interest in politics, whether they see voting as a duty, and so on.
In this case ICM asked a question on attitudes to voting, asking people whether it was their duty to vote, or if people should only vote if they cared who won, or whether it was really not worth doing at all. This was then cross referenced with the 1-10 likelihood to vote scale to produce a 30 cell matrix and people were weighted by the result. This appears to be a slightly harsher likelihood to vote filter - in the case of the Crewe and Nantwich poll it increased Conservative support by 1 point and reduced Labour by 1 point - but we won’t really be sure of the effect until we’ve seen it in action over a couple of polls.
The tables for ICM’s poll in Crewe and Nantwich are now available on their website, and they reveal some brand new changes to ICM’s methodology which I’ll look at in the next post. First though, let’s dig through the entrails of the Crewe and Nantwich findings.
The narrowness of the 4% was indeed largely down to ICM’s normal spiral of silence adjustment. Taking just those people who actually gave voting intentions to ICM, the Conservatives had a solid 12 point lead. The narrowing of the lead was because a large proportion of respondents who told ICM they voted Labour in 2005 said they didn’t know how they would vote in the by-election: 61 out of 295 apparently - 21% of last time’s Labour voters, compared to 6% of last time’s Conservatives and 23% of the small number of voted Lib Dem last time in Crewe and Nantwich.
This means the vast majority of the don’t knows up there in Crewe are former Labour voters and ICM are making the assumption that those people will disproportionately end up voting Labour. ICM do this by reallocating 50% of don’t knows to the party they voted for last time, based on past research showing this is how people tend to behave at general elections. It is only an assumption of course, and people may behave differently at by-elections. If those former Labour voters actually stay at home or switch to the Conservatives the Tory lead would be much larger. If more than 50% of them end up voting Labour the Tory lead would be smaller than ICM’s poll suggests.
Another intriguing finding in the by-election poll was that the Conservative lead was much higher when people in Crewe and Nantwich were asked how they would vote in a general election - a 16 point lead in fact. On the face of this it is counterintuitive as we are used to bigger swings in by-elections than in general elections, not vice-versa. My best guess to explain this before seeing the tables was that ICM must have used the candidates names in the by-election question resulting in a “Dunwoody effect”. This was wrong - ICM didn’t use candidates names so this can’t be the reason. The actual reason seems to be that more people gave voting intentions for a general election tomorrow than for the by-election.
Comparing people’s answers in the by-election question and general election question, very few people actually changed their answers. Of 478 responses to how they would vote in the by-election, only 13 said they would vote differently if it was a general election. The difference seems to be almost entirely people who didn’t give a voting intention for a by-election, which does rather suggest that those don’t knows aren’t likely to break in Labour’s favour….
This Sunday’s Observer has the first figures from PoliticsHome’s Phi5000 - these are figures from daily questioning of a panel of 5000 respondents by YouGov, recruited from the YouGov panel. What this isn’t is a normal YouGov poll, rather the Phi5000 is shamelessly prioritising tracking - the polls are weighted politically in the same way as YouGov’s polls so they aren’t skewed in a party partisan way, but beyond that representativeness takes a back seat to consistency, with the same people being questioned each day. This takes sample variation out of the picture - while the people within the 5000 who respond on a particular day might vary slightly, generally speaking if the figures change, the people on the panel must have changed their mind.
There are also downsides to this - being on an internet panel shouldn’t make you unrepresentative per se, but people willing to fill in a survey every day must be somewhat different to their peers (as would somone willing to do a phone survey everyday). Secondly, if was ever a risk of respondents being subject to a panel effect, it’s going to happen here. The most likely effect of that, and the effect I know Stephan is hoping for, is that members of the panel, aware they are going to be asked about their perceptions of issues of the day become more attentive to them, and the tracker becomes faster and more sensitive.
So what do we take from the first set of figures? The Observer today naturally concentrates upon the absolute figures - and there are interesting findings there - but that’s rather missing the point. What these are all about is the change, what underlying opinions are changing and at what point. Looking at the trends released there are no huge surprises so far - Brown and the government’s ratings have continued to plummet in the last month and more people now think the Conservatives would do better in government (that is a big change from when the same question used to be asked in the BrandIndex trackers, when however unpopular the government was, people didn’t expect the Conservatives would be much better).
The most interesting findings in these early figures are the ratings of party leaders. These are not from just asking yea or nay about individuals, but generated from a list of positive and negative perceptions - how many people think each man is strong, efficient, decisive, etc on one hand, or weak, incompetent or so on on the other. The net scores are the average proportion of people choosing each positive attribute for a leader minus the average proportion of people choosing each negative attribute for him. This produces several interesting findings - firstly, Nick Clegg is a positive for the Lib Dems, his net ratings are very similar to David Cameron’s, so when he trails in third place in things like best PM it’s probably just because he is a Liberal Democrat and because he is less well known than Brown and Cameron. Those who do have a perception of him as a leader have a relatively positive one.
More fascinating is looking at Brown’s underlying figures. His rating hasn’t slumped across the board, it’s only in specific areas. People haven’t just turned against him and given him bad ratings across the board - most of his ratings have been relatively stable and there has, for example, been little change in things like whether he is seen as “in touch”, “caring” or “sleazy”. Where perceptions have drastically altered is a leap in the proportion of people who said they thought Gordon Brown was “indecisive”, “weak”, “ineffective” and “out of ideas”, and a drop in the proportion of people who thought he was “competent”.
Perceptions of the other two leaders have been more stable. The increase in Cameron’s figures is pretty much across the board, just a warming towards him rather than any change in perceptions. The biggest changes for Nick Clegg are an increase in people who think he is “likeable”, “normal” and “intelligent” - the biggest drop in “None of the above” - his increase is from people gradually getting to know him. His percieved gaffe in talking about his past love life seems only to have made people think of him as a normal chap.
The Mail on Sunday has an ICM poll conducted in Crewe and Nantwich. Voting intention in the by-election is CON 43%, LAB 39%, LDEM 16%. This compares to the actual result at the last election of CON 33%, LAB 49%, LDEM 19%, and if repeated at the by-election would be a 10 point swing.
By-election polls in the past don’t have a particularly good track record. That may actually be because they have been done early in by-election campaigns, when actually voting intentions clearly do change decisively within the couple of weeks during a by-election. Either way, we shouldn’t expect this to be a very good prediction of what the final result of Crewe and Nantwich will be.
Does that mean the poll doesn’t matter? Not at all. As I’ve said before, in a by-election in a government held seat a lot of voters will be looking for the party that is best positioned to defeat Labour and punish the government. This poll suggests that party is the Conservatives and that they are alread in a very strong position to win it.
UPDATE: In Iain Dale’s report of the figures he says “I am told the by election figures were adjusted downwards to take account of large number of Labour don’t knows. If they stayed at home on polling day, the Tories would win by 13 points.” I assume that refers to ICM’s normal re-allocation of don’t knows to account for “a spiral of silence” amongst supporters of an unfashionable party, and the tendency for don’t knows who do vote to end up voting for their usual party. For it to change a lead of 13 points into one of 4 points though there must have been a vast proportion of Labour voters telling ICM they didn’t know.
Today’s YouGov poll was also reported as showing that any alternative Labour leader would perform even worse than Gordon Brown. YouGov gave respondents a list of other politicians and asked if people would be more or less likely to vote Labour in a general election if they were leader - all had a negative net score, with more people saying they would be less likely to vote Labour with them in charge than more likely.
I would be very dubious indeed about these questions for two reasons. Firstly there’s the question design - less or more likely doesn’t tell you that much. Many of the people who said they would be more likely to vote Labour with X in charge already vote Labour, so yes - having that person in charge might firm up their support but isn’t winning more votes. Many people who say they would be less likely to vote Labour with X in charge are already not voting Labour, so it may be driving them even further away, but since they aren’t voting Labour anyway it’s not necessarily much of a loss. If you must do questions like this, it’s better to ask people how they would vote if X, Y and Z were party leaders, giving alternative Labour leaders in different versions of the question.
Even then though (and I’d be amazed if some questions like that didn’t come along sooner or later), the questions would be pretty meaningless. Regular readers will remember the questions we had when Tony Blair was Prime Minister that asked how people would vote if Gordon Brown was leader. Back then I had to laden down the results with lots of caveats about people not being very good predictors of how they would react to future events and that, in practice, Brown would probably get a big boost upon being leader. In the event he did, but a few months later he was trailing in the polls in much the way those pre-Brown polls had predicted. Those were a special case though, since Brown had been a very prominent politician for the previous decade and the public knew him well and knew what he was like. It could have turned out very differently and Brown could have shown a completely different side of his personality as Prime Minister… he didn’t, he was the same Gordon Brown and people reacted in the way they thought they would. But the fact remains he could have surprised them.
In this case, with the possible exception of Jack Straw, none of the possible replacements for Brown are widely known by the public. YouGov took this into account to some extent in today’s poll by giving respondents the option of saying they didn’t know enough about each person (38% gave that response for James Purnell and Andy Burnham, 16% for David Miliband, 6% for Jack Straw), but the problem is really unsurmountable. People can’t say how their opinions would really change were Andy Burnham or James Purnell Prime Minister since they’ve little or no idea of who they are, what they are like or what on earth they would do or change as Prime Minister.
If Brown’s leadership starts to come under real pressure then expect more polls like this…but unless they are about very well known politicians treat them as just a bit of fun.
A new YouGov poll for the Sun tomorrow has topline figures, with changes from their last poll, of CON 49%(+5), LAB 23%(-3), LDEM 17%(nc). This is the first poll conducted wholly after both the local election results and Boris Johnson’s victory in London, though Populus’s poll was partially conducted after the mayoral results.
The 26 point lead is obviously in a different league to every poll that’s gone before, on a uniform swing it would produce a Conservative majority of 272 (though obviously, in the vastly unlikely event that such a lead occured at a general election all bets would be off and who knows what freakish result would actually occur). It’s the sort of lead that ICM - the only pollster whose figures from back in 1992-1997 are comparable to their figures today - was recording for the Labour party when the Conservative party was flat on the canvas back in 1995.
As ever, we need to be cautious about any poll that shows large shifts of support. This one is explicable - big election victories like the local elections last week often have a halo effect, the winner suddenly has the aura of victory about them, the loser the scent of defeat. Another good example are the polls from straight after the Lib Dem victory in the Brent East by-election back in 2003, when the aura of success about them briefly saw them leap to joint first place in the polls on 31%.
They soon fell back, and if that’s what’s going on here the Tories will fall back too; I personally find it hard to believe they’ll stay at quite this level anyway. Alternatively, the local election defeat may have been the trigger for a real change in public attitudes towards Labour, confirming an image of them as past it and ready to be kicked out.
A third possibility of course, is that this is just a freak result. Remember Populus’s poll earlier this week showed no such similar jump in the Tory lead. YouGov normally show the largest leads, so I doubt other companies will match the scale of this lead, but we’ll have to see if they show the same trend towards even larger Conservative leads.
UPDATE: The Sun says this is the lowest Labour have ever sunk in the polls since records began. Is it? As far as I tell it equals their lowest rating ever. There was also a Gallup poll in December 1981 that put them on 23%.
UPDATE 2: Seems it’s even lower than December 1981. Apparently that Gallup poll actually had Labour on 23.5%, so this really is the lowest since records began.
Populus’s monthly poll in the Times, with changes from their last poll (conducted for the Daily Mirror in the middle of last month), has voting intentions of CON 40%(nc), LAB 29%(-1), LDEM 19%(nc). The poll was conducted between the 2nd and 4th May (Friday to Sunday).
This is the first poll since the local elections and the mayoral election and is practically unchanged since Populus’s last poll, suggesting no obvious aura effect from the Conservative victory. That does not, of course, change the fact that the poll is awful for Labour. The Populus poll a fortnight ago was already Populus’s worst ever poll for Labour, and this is a point worse.
The rest of the poll has similarly awful news for the government. The Times concentrates on 55% of Labour voters agreeing that the party would do better if Brown made way for a “younger, fresher, more charismatic alternative” which seems to me a somewhat pointless question: would the party do better with a better leader? Well - er, yes, almost by definition they would.
Other findings are just as bad though - Gordon Brown’s average rating out of 10 has dropped to a frankly embarrassing 4.08, which as far as I can tell is the lowest any leader has ever recorded in the period Populus have asked this question - worse than IDS’s or Ming Campbell’s lowest scores. David Cameron’s meanwhile is up at 5.36, the highest Populus have ever recorded for a Tory leader. On the economy 40% now trust Cameron and Osborne most to deal with economic problems compared to 30% for Brown and Darling.
During the last week or so of the London mayoral election campaign when my attention was elsewhere there were also a couple of Scottish opinion polls, so here’s a catch up:
Westminster election
TNS System Three - CON 17%, LAB 39%, LDEM 10%, SNP 31%
YouGov - CON 17%, LAB 34%, LDEM 14%, SNP 30%
Scottish Parliament
Constituency vote
TNS System Three - CON 12%, LAB 31%, LDEM 11%, SNP 45%
YouGov - CON 13%, LAB 31%, LDEM 15%, SNP 36%
Scottish Opinion - CON 13%, LAB 33%, LDEM 10%, SNP 40%
Regional Vote
TNS System Three - CON 12%, LAB 29%, LDEM 12%, SNP 41%
YouGov - CON 13%, LAB 28%, LDEM 13%, SNP 37%
The YouGov poll has a range of other questions apart from voting intention. As one might expect given the high polling ratings for the SNP, there were positive ratings for the Scottish administration (net approval of plus 25) and Alex Salmond as first minister (net satisfaction of plus 20). In contrast Wendy Alexander had a net score for doing a good job of minus 39. The other two party leaders, Annabel Goldie and Nicol Stephen both had notably high don’t know ratings (39% and 45% respectively), suggesting people are largely unaware of what they are doing. Of those who did express and opinion, Goldie’s ratings were far better than Stephen’s (plus 21, as opposed to minus 1).
The Cameron effect doesn’t seem to be penetrating north of the border. 13% of respondents said they were more likely to vote Conservative with David Cameron as leader…but 14% said they were less likely. Questions like this aren’t perfect, since people may become more positive or negative towards a party because of the actions of the leader or the way he has changed the party, without ascribing the change directly to the leader himself - but the Westminister voting intention figures in the polls back up the finding, showing no significant increase in Tory support in Scotland since the last general election.
YouGov also asked where the blame