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.
YouGov’s weekly mayoral election poll for the Evening Standard is out - this will the last Monday poll, though there may yet be a final eve-of-poll effort - and with four days to go shows Boris Johnson with a solid lead. The first round voting intention figures are JOHNSON 46%(+2), LIVINGSTONE 35%(-2) (Brian Paddick’s figure doesn’t seem to be in the Standard’s report). After second preferences are reallocated Boris leads Ken by 55% to 45%, suggesting that second preferences are very marginally in favour of Ken, but not by enough to have a significant effect.
With so little time to go Boris Johnson must be almost assured of victory… if the poll is correct. In contrast to YouGov’s figures the final MORI and mruk polls of the campaign showed very small leads for Ken. It boils down to either Johnson having a secure lead if you believe YouGov, or Livingstone barely ahead if you believe MORI and mruk. I’ll be putting up a post looking at some of the reasons why the polls may be showing such contrasting figures later today.
YouGov’s monthly poll for the Telegraph shows a massive 18 point lead over Labour. The full topline figures are CON 44%(nc), LAB 26%(-2), LDEM 17%(nc).
The poll was conducted between the 21st and 23rd of April, so while the 10p row was at its height, but almost entirely before the government announced their change of policy Wednesday lunchtime. It goes without saying that the poll shows the exactly opposite trend to ICM’s earlier this week, which suggests one (or both) of the polls are outliers. Certainly given the mess the government was in when this poll was being taken, a fall in Labour support seems prima facie more likely, but we’ll see.
This is the largest poll lead the Conservatives have achieved since 1987, and the lowest Labour share of support I can find since the aftermath of their 1983 rout, though I don’t have very complete records of opinion polls prior to 1987. If repeated at a general election it would produce a Conservative landslide majority of 154, with Labour down to 190 seats.
YouGov’s weekly Mayoral election tracker for the Evening Standard has topline voting intentions of JOHNSON 44%(-1), LIVINGSTONE 37%(-2), PADDICK 12%(nc). Once second preferences are reallocated the result is JOHNSON 53%, LIVINGSTONE 47%.
Johnson’s lead has fallen from the heights it reached earlier in the campaign (my guess was that this was becase of Boris’s less than impressive performances in the televised debates, though it could be because the earlier large leads were when the Lee Jasper affair was prominent in the London media). However, this poll is pretty consistent with YouGov’s figures from last week (and indeed with MORI’s figures from last week) suggesting the position has stabilised. There are now only 10 days to go until the mayoral election, so while this race has moved about a bit over the last few weeks, there isn’t much time for Livingstone to turn round a 6 point deficit and Boris looks set to win.
All this depends, of course, on YouGov’s polls being right. They have been the most regular pollster during the London mayoral campaign, but other companies have tended to show a tighter race. In their most recent poll Ipsos MORI, the only other company to have produced more than one mayoral poll in this election, also showed Johnson with a 6% lead in the first round, but showed a narrower contest as second preferences split overwhelmingly in Livingstone’s favour.
Low turnout elections do tend to be tricker for pollsters to predict correctly (though YouGov did manage it in 2004), but judging by the polls Boris does seem to have a significant lead as the candidates turn the corner into the final straight.
As usual the YouGov poll in the Sunday Times contained a wonderful grab-bag of issues. One that got some coverage in the papers was a question asking how people would vote if Tony Blair was still Prime Minister - it is of course pure media fluff given that Tony Blair is not about to suddenly return, deux ex machina, and save Labour from electoral doom, but for the record the poll showed a Conservative lead of only 5 points with Blair as Labour leader.
If Brown was replaced, who would people like to see as his replacement? YouGov asked and Jack Straw came out top with 13%, followed by David Miliband on 7%, Harriet Harman on 5% and Alan Johnson on 5%. Straw’s position at the top is almost certainly purely a result of name recognition - no one else managed 5% and a whopping 61% said don’t know. At this stage, with no obvious alternative to Brown who is well known by the public, questions like this really don’t tell us anything.
10p tax rate
52% of people would prefer to have the previous arrangements of 22p basic rate and a 10p starting rate, 20p would rather have the 20p basic rate and no starting rate. 35% of respondents said they now thought the worse of Gordon Brown because of his decision to abolish the 10p rate and cut the basic rate.
Faith schools
Better news for Labour here - asked if Ed Balls was right to criticise faith schools over unfair admission procedures 50% of people agreed with him, compared to 38% who thought he was undermining good faith schools and should leave them be.
Boris Johnson’s lead in the latest YouGov poll for the Evening Standard has halved. The topline voting intention figures, with changes from last week, are JOHNSON 45%(-4), LIVINGSTONE 39%(+3), PADDICK 12%(+2). Re-allocating second preference votes increases Johnson’s lead slightly, putting him 8 points ahead 54% to 46%. The poll was conducted between 9th and 11th April, so was after the Newsnight debate between the mayoral candidates, in which most people seem to feel that Boris did badly. YouGov found 40% of respondents agreeing with the statement “Boris Johnson is not serious enough to be an effective Mayor of London” - this is up from 34% a week ago.
Co-incidentally the lead in first preferences is now the same from YouGov and MORI, though the projections for second preferences are still very different. Perhaps more significantly, so are the trends - MORI’s figures are pretty static, YouGov are showing the race getting much closer…
A new YouGov poll for the Sunday Times has voting intention figures, with charges from their last poll, of CON 44%(+1), LAB 28%(-1), LDEM 17%(nc). The poll would have been conducted between the 10th and 11th of April, so the fieldwork would have co-incided with the Bank of England rate cut and lots of discussion in the media about the state of the economy.
The change from the last YouGov poll is insignificant, and the 16 point lead is the same as the YouGov poll before that - together the three YouGov polls since the budget paint a pretty consistent position of a Tory lead up to the mid-teens, enough for a substantial majority if repeated at an election. The picture they paint is also pretty consistent with ICM’s recent polls (though they show a smaller Tory because their topline adjustment is picking up some “shy Labour voters”). Harder to explain is that Populus poll in the week showing a much smaller Tory lead.
There is supposedly also a poll due in tomorrow’s Observer (MORI, I would guess), so it will interesting to see if that shows the same sort of large lead as ICM and YouGov are showing, or the sort of narrower lead that Populus and ComRes have found.
UPDATE: For the record, I’ve already seen a couple of comments about it being a 16 year high rating for the Tories. It isn’t. It’s the highest since December when YouGov had them at 45%.
YouGov have published a lengthy piece of polling on attitudes towards immigration, conducted for a three party Channel 4 Dispatches programme on the subject. There’s plenty of interest in the figures here.
What interested me most there is the contrast in attitudes towards asylum seekers and economic migrants. It may just be me, but in discussion of immigration, I often detect an underlying assumption that public are more well disposed towards asylum seekers than economic migrants, that they are more charitable towards people fleeing from danger than from people just after earning money. In fact, the poll suggests the opposite - the public are more positive towards economic migrants than they are towards asylum seekers.
38% of people thought that “most migrant workers” didn’t contribute anything to the economy and are a drain on resources. Asked the same question about asylum seekers, 59% agreed (of course, this particular result may just be a recognition that while asylum seekers cases are being considered they are prevented by law from contributing to the economy). Asked what changes they would like to the immigration system, 29% said they would like to dramatically cut the number of asylum seekers, so most immigrants are migrant workers. Only 19% prefered to cut migrant workers so most immigrants were asylum seekers who “really needed our help”.
It may be a sign that people are more concerned about whether immigrants contribute to the economy or not once they get here, rather than how ‘deserving’ they are to come here. Alternatively, it may just be that the term “asylum seeker” has picked up a lot of negative connetations from the tabloid media when migrant worker hasn’t.
Politicshome, which officially launches today, has up as Breaking news that the lastest poll (presumably YouGov for the Evening Standard) has Boris Johnson leading Ken Livingstone by 13 points. I’ll post properly once I’ve seen the poll.
UPDATE: The new YouGov poll for the Evening Standard has topline figures - with changes from last week’s poll - of JOHNSON 49%(+2), Livingstone 36%(-1), Paddick 10%(nc). Boris Johnson remains slightly shy of an overall majority, so taking into account second preference votes the figures become Johnson 56%, Livingstone 44% - so it appears this time the second preferences are breaking slightly in favour of Livingstone.
Following the fuss last week there is a slight difference in YouGov’s methodology to take into account ethnicity. YouGov are now weighting to 26% non-white Londoners. This is somewhat lower than the 29% ICM are aiming for. YouGov’s figures are based on the proportion of ethnic minorities over the age of 18 in the 2001 census. 29% is the proportion of ethnic minorities in London as a whole, since the non-white population is disproportionately young. I think it is also - by co-incidence - the GLA’s 2008 projection of the proportion of ethnic minorities of economically active age, which I guess is where ICM’s figure came from. Whoever is right, the slight difference between YouGov and ICM’s proportions of ethnic minorities is not going to make a hugely significant difference, perhaps a percentage point or two.
On the subject of the London elections, there’s a fun tool here that matches candidates to your policy preferences.