YouGov give the Conservatives a 7 point lead
There is somewhat less confusion about the actual state of the parties with YouGov’s monthly poll, which tallies with the sort of lead produced by ICM and Communicate during the past week. The topline figures with changes from YouGov’s last poll are CON 39% (+3), LAB 32% (-4), LDEM 16% (nc). YouGov’s last poll was conducted immediately after the Labour conference and was probaby the result of a “Blair boost” from his conference speech. Rather than a sudden Conservative boost, this poll looks more like a return to the sort of figures YouGov had been producing prior to the Conference season.
On a forced choice question asking, if they had to choose, whether people would prefer a Labour government led by Gordon Brown or a Conservative government led by David Cameron, Cameron now leads Gordon Brown by 46% to 33%, a thirteen point lead. This compares to a lead of 7 point lead when the same question was asked in September and a 17 point Labour lead at the last election. When YouGov release the full tables for this poll it will be interesting to see how Lib Dem voters split on the question - I’ve always viewed forced choice questions like this as a potential pointer to the way tactical voting may play in the future.
Filed under: Voting Intention, YouGov
When I last had an email dialogue with MORI, they said, “National face-to-face polls interviewing is done in ’sampling points’ randomly selected to be representative of the country as a whole. These may be very small typically consisting of a couple of hundred addresses. Our interviewers are set quotas - instructions on how many men, women, age groups etc - to ensure that the sample of respondents they interview is representative of the people who live in the locality. The interviewer then finds the appropriate quota - say 13 interviews for a 25-30 minute questionnaire - and interviewing them in-home”.
Looking at MORI’s latest polls there are 188 sampling points.
I make these observations:
How often are the sampling points changed?
Are they changed because of ‘unacceptable’ results?
MORI choose the questions, choose the quotas, choose the interviewers and choose the people to be interviewed.
In a purely random sample, everyone has some chance of being involved. However with MORI, if the sampling points are not changed at every poll, virtually no one has a chance of being interviewed.
Even so we can’t disregard MORI as they been accurate in the past and obviously they have an interest in being accurate.
Although the Conservatives are beginning to register solid leads in the polls, such as this YouGov survey, their share of the vote is still rather low.
In fact, looking at the last 73 opinion polls on this website, not a single one has any party reaching 42% of the vote, and only 9 of them have any party reaching 40%, (8 Conservative and 1 Labour).
It will be interesting to see if this pattern continues in 2007, or whether David Cameron can push the Tories towards 45%.
I find it amusing that until very recently the Tories only ever seemed to get in the 32-34% range, for about 12-13 years they barely moved in the polls and people were saying that in order to be taken seriously as possible election winners they’d need to be looking at 40%+ in the polls.
Now that the Tories have had 40% quite a few times (over 10% and esp. compared to Labour) in recent times, and are consistently near it people are saying they should be looking at getting even higher.
Changed circumstances, or just changed goalposts?
Philip,
I don’t see a contradiction, polling 40% means they can be seen as with a serious chance of winning, but it isn’t in itself enough to win.
What people are saying for the first time in a decade is that it’s ” Game On”, not yet “Game Over”. So it’s changed perceptions as opposed to goalposts or circumstances.
As Anthony said, The effect on LibDems of the forced choice will be interesting. As for me a Scottish LibDem response to a forced choice between salmond and Mcconnel would be interesting but under PR might have a more limited effect.
Peter.
I guess the parties’ share of the vote will be lower then the others are this high - this poll has them at 13%, does it? So what makes that 13% then?
No one I’ve heard says the Tories need 40%+ in the polls to win; they’ve said they need 40%+ on election day. To get 40%+ on election day, an Opposition in mid term needs to exceed - by a decent amount - 40%+ because it is unheard of for the main opposition party to increase their vote share between mid-term and election day.
When you factor in the problems the Conservatives have (at present) with the electoral system, it becomes even more important for their mid-term vote share to exceed 40%.
This isn’t anti-Tory bias, Phillip: throughout the mid-term elections of the 1980s, Labour spokesmen constantly tried to present ok council results as evidence that they were on course for general eleciton victory, only for Ivor Crewe or Anthony King to point out their vote share - at their height - was only 38%/39% - nowhere near enough to withstand the inevitable Tory government rebound when people were forced to choose an administration rather than protest.
Anthony,
Any idea when the full tables will be posted, as ever I am interested in how Scotland is looking.
Six months to go and Brown has already rolled out the Governor of the Bank of England. Things are geting serious already.
Peter.
[...] If Gordon Brown becomes leader of the Labour Party next year and therefore Prime Minister, as expected, he will have to face David Cameron at the next election. Cameron is young, charismatic and doesn’t carry any baggage, and so comes without the negative characteristics that the perception panel identified in Brown. This is a good start, and is backed up by the polls. Over at UK Polling Report the gap between Brown and Cameron seems to be widening. In September YouGov, in a forced choice question, asked voters if they would prefer a Labour Government led by Gordon Brown or a Conservative Government led by David Cameron. In this poll the Conservatives came out on top with a 7 point lead, and when the same question was asked this month their lead extended to 13 points. Unfortunately for Brown, there’s much more where this came from. All the leading Pollsters since the beginning of this year concerning voting intensions at the next election presupposing a Brown led Labour party and a Cameron led Conservative party, have put the Conservatives ahead of Labour. [...]
Anthony,
When ( or if) a full breakdown is issued, is there anyway to compare this with previous surveys to see if there are any signs of changes in likelyhood to vote by party.
I know you tend to ask the will you vote question first, but as there is an entry for everyone who replies it should be possible to go through past results and see if identified party supporters are more or less likely to vote.
In the same way it should also be technically possible to show how many of your long term panelists have “changed” allegience.
Peter.