MORI’s political monitor for May is out. The topline figures with changes from last month are CON 37%(-1), LAB 35%(+4), LDEM 18%(-2). The fieldwork for the poll was actually conducted prior to the recent YouGov and Communicate Research polls, but the trend matches that of the other polls since Tony Blair’s announcement of his retirement - a boost for Labour, slightly more at the expense of the Liberal Democrats than the Tories.
UPDATE: A late entrant for the “Atrocious press coverage of opinion polls” award! The Daily Express reports the poll as showing the Tories slumping from “42% to 37% since last month” (that’ll be down one point from 38% last month) “after a fortnight of Conservative feuding over grammar schools” (that’ll be in a poll entirely conducted within a week of David Willett’s original speech).
Communicate’s May poll for the Independent has topline figures with changes from last month of CON 35%(-1), LAB 31%(+4), LDEM 19%(-3). This largely reflects the trend seen in the other May polls, which have seen a Labour recovery, most often at the expense of the Liberal Democrats - although it is worth adding that in this case of Communicate Labour are recovering from an exceptionally low figure last month.
UPDATE: Several more things - firstly I still haven’t seen the details of how Communicate weight their polls by past vote, but looking at their tables they seem to weight people who voted for “other” parties in 2005 very highly. In reality 8% of people in Great Britain voted for a party other than the main three. Because of false recall ICM and Populus weight their samples so that amongst voters the share is actually lower than that at around 7%. Amongst those who voted in Communicate’s sample 12% of people reporting voting for an “other” party in 2005. Perhaps this explains the rather low shares of the vote for the main parties.
Secondly, Labour voters seem to be much firmer than usual in their intention to vote. The normal pattern is that Conservative and Lib Dem voters say they are more likely to vote than Labour voters do. In this poll the Tories, as usual, had the most committed voters, with 64% of Tory voters saying they were 10/10 certain to vote, but Labour were very close behind with 60% of their voters 10/10 certain. To some extent the increase in Labour support since Blair’s resignation does seem to be down to a re-invigoration of existing Labour supporters. It is the same if you look at the detailed tables of ICM’s last two polls, on ICM’s figures without turnout weighting they would have been up just one point, with turnout weighting they go up two.
Finally a lot of newspaper coverage has taken up the question on whether Brown or Cameron would be more likely to keep their party united, where Brown led by 40% to Cameron’s 37%. This is being widely contrasting to a question from a Communicate poll at the end of last month where 64% of respondents said they thought Labour were divided and 36% thought the Tories were.
For a whole barrel load of reasons it isn’t comparable in the slightest. The question last month asked people to say which parties were divided, they could have picked all three if they wanted. Today’s question asked people to pick either Brown or Cameron, you couldn’t pick both. The question last month asked about the parties as they are now, the questions published today ask people what they think will happen in the future. The questions last month asked about the parties and how united they were, the questions published today asked about the abilities of Brown and Cameron to deal with and contain such division.
In the defence of the media, I haven’t spotted anyone drawing a direct comparison between the two questions, but I’m certain that is meaning many people who hadn’t read either of the questions would take away. If you want to draw a trend from one month to the next, the questions have to be comparable.
More from this month’s YouGov poll in Monday’s Telegraph , largely about public perceptions of Gordon Brown. The overall findings contain nothing new - Brown is seen as intelligent, effective, competent and decisive, but also divisive, gloomy and dull.
More interesting is whether or not the leadership campaign (if you can call it a campaign without any rivals) so far has succeeded in improving Brown’s image. 22% of people said that Brown had made a favourable impression upon them since announcing his candidacy, 20% said he had made a negative impression - I suspect those answers will be largely partisan, with the 22% of positive answers mostly existing Labour supporters backing “their guy”. More interesting is the way the answers to the questions about Brown’s public image have changed since they were last asked in September 2006.
First the positives: Brown’s net scores on being effective and competent have barely changed since last September at +10 and +28 (compared to +11 and +27 in September), his net score on being decisive is up to +35 from +28 in September. Some of Brown’s negatives are also unchanged - he isn’t any more trusted than in September (-18 now, -19 then), and is barely seen as more able to unite the country (-31 now, -33 then) or cheerful (-32 now, -34 then).
In some areas those his public perception has improved. His net score on being “concerned for the country as a whole” rather than just himself was minus 23 in September 2006, now it is only minus 10. His net score on being caring was minus 6 last September, now it scrapes into positive territory at plus 1. Finally, the big question of whether Brown has made himself any more likeable - back in September his net score was minus 19, now it is only minus 8.
So, has the Brown PR offensive made people warm to him? Certainly they seem to like him more than last September, but I’m not quite sure it’s down to the last couple of week’s activities. The September questions were conducted just after Tom Watson’s resignation, widely percieved as an abortive “Brownite coup”, with saw perceptions of Gordon Brown drop sharply. The increase in Brown’s ratings since then could just as much be the result of his image recovering from the events of last September and they could be the result of the last couple of weeks’ campaign. Still - I can’t image all these same sort of questions won’t be asked again when Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister and we’ll see then if his image really has improved.
Despite the major differences between the methodology used by the different pollsters, by hook or by crook the voting intention figures they produce all tend to be relatively similar to one another. The exception is the Liberal Democrats, who vary significantly between ICM, who give them the highest scores, and YouGov, who give them the lowest. In a post earlier this year I calculated the average difference between the Lib Dem scores from the two pollsters to be 3.0%. Perhaps this is made even more noticable because it does make it difficult to judge how well the Lib Dems are doing - there are sometimes significant differences between the pollsters Labour or Conservative scores, but since recently the overall picture is always one of a Conservative lead over Labour it doesn’t really change anything. When it comes to the Lib Dems all the polls show thenm down on the last election, but with ICM is a relatively small fall, with YouGov they appear to have been mercilessly squeezed.
Several people have asked what the reason might be - including a post my Mark Park on Libdemvoice here - and which figure (if any) is right? Unfortunately these are no easy answers to who is right, but I can at least flag up some potential reasons:
Mode of questioning. ICM and Populus ask people over the phone, YouGov ask people online. In lots of cases people might give an answer to an anonymous computer screen that they would be embarrassed to give to a live interviewer on the other end of a phone line. Obvious cases are extremist parties like the BNP, but small fringe parties suffer in general because people are unsure about going out on a limb. With a mainstream party like the Lib Dems this shouldn’t be a factor…but actually it could be having a knock-on effect. Some support for the Liberal Democrats isn’t positive support for their ideas or policies, but a “neither of the above” vote. Potentially some of the higher support for the Lib Dems in phone polls could be “neither of above” voters who might really be tending towards fringe or extreme parties but are unsure about naming a fringe party to an interviewer. Given that YouGov tend to have a higher “other” score than other pollsters though, this might well be a factor.
Don’t knows. ICM and Populus both do an adjustment to their figures to take account of don’t knows. Based on past studies they assume that a proportion of don’t knows will actually end up voting for the party they did last time round. People normally think of this as an adjustment for “shy Tories”, but the net effect these days is rarely if ever to help the Conservatives. For the last couple of years it has normally helped Labour. The way it works though will help any party who finds that some of their past supporters have drifted away and are now telling pollsters they don’t know how they’ll vote. In ICM polls 50% of previous Lib Dem voters who now say “don’t know” are added onto the Lib Dem score, in Populus polls they re-allocate 30% of previous Lib Dem voters. Does this increase the level of Lib Dem support in ICM polls? Because ICM publish the figures before and after the adjustment this is one area where we can quantify the difference - some observers have taken the difference as having emerged after December 2005, so taking the 18 monthly ICM polls since then, the adjustment has been large enough to increase the Lib Dem score by 1 point six times, and has reduced it by 1 once - so on average it increases Lib Dem support by 0.28 of a percentage point, leaving another 2.72% difference to be explained by other factors.
Likelihood to vote. Uniquely amongst the pollsters YouGov do not filter or weight by likelihood to vote. If Lib Dem supporters were actually more likely to vote than supporters of other parties then this could explain some of the difference. In fact, it’s normally Tory supporters who are most likely to vote, followed by the Lib Dems with Labour supporters further behind - so perhaps this could be contributing to a lower level of Lib Dem support in YouGov polls? Again, by looking at the figures before weighting by turnout in ICM’s detailled tables we can quantify this - since December 2005 ICM have published the breakdown for likelihood to vote from 11 of their Guardian polls. If you compare what the rounded figure would have been without turnout weighting, and what it actually was afterwards, 2 times it increased the LD score by a point, 2 times it reduced it…so it has no overall effect at all. Even with MORI’s very harsh filter by turnout it makes only a minimal difference.
Sampling. Could there be a difference from the sampling techniques? Could the people who pop up in a telephone poll be more likely to be Lib Dem voters than people who join an online polling panel? In terms of political activists it probably works the other way if anything, but when it comes to normal voters who knows? It is possible, but given than both ICM and YouGov weight their polls politically it this was a problem it would be something that the pollsters should be able to address using political weighting - if YouGov’s sampling produced too few Lib Dems they would weight they upwards, if ICM’s produced too many they would weight them down (though in actual fact ICM tends to weight the proportion of part Lib Dem voters upwards, sometimes quite heavily). That bring us to…
Weighting targets. This is potentially where most of the difference lies. I suspect that when pollsters weight their polls politically ICM and Populus are weighting their sample to have a slightly higher proportion of past Lib Dem voters than YouGov are. Unfortunately it is impossible to directly compare the proportions used because ICM and Populus weight using recalled past vote and YouGov weight using party identification.
The data used for political weighting. This is the most subtle difference, and the one that I suspect is behind a fair amount of the difference. Phone polls do their political weighting based on data that is collected now. They then have to take account of false recall and forgetfulness when drawing up weighting targets. In contrast YouGov weight their polls using the data they collected back in May 2005 when it was fresh in respondents minds who they had actually voted for that day. The people who voted Lib Dem in 2005 but who don’t recall or say they voted for a different party if you ask them now are, perhaps not surprisingly, also far less likely to say they would vote Lib Dem in a general election tomorrow. In other words, the past Lib Dem voters that phone pollsters find are the more committed Liberal Democrats. “Flakier” Liberal Democrats who are more likely to switch to other parties are more likely to have forgotten they voted Lib Dem in the first place. Those identified as Lib Dems in YouGov’s samples probably contain more of those “flaky” Lib Dems than those identified as Lib Dems in phone samples.
What is the ultimate reason for the difference? I don’t know. It looks as though we can rule out likelihood to vote weighting and we can see that the “spiral of silence adjustment” is only a very small factor. The mode of questioning may be having some effect - people who say “Liberal Democrat” to a live interviewer might be willing to admit to a computer screen that they will actually vote for a smaller fringe party. In my opinion the difference is more likely to be somewhere in the weighting, and here is it almost impossible to draw any conclusions - ICM and YouGov weight using a different measure, based on data collected at different times and, as with all political weighting, chosing the targets they weight to is as much an art as a science.
Who’s right? It is impossible to say. If the reason had turned out to be something to do with likelihood to vote then you could have a rationial discussion about to what extent and how turnout should be factored in, ditto the way don’t knows are dealt with. It really is very difficult to make informed judgements about weighting. I am not one who believes that is any accurate way of telling how well parties are doing apart from polls: people vote differently in general elections to local elections; even if they were a decent guide, we must be approaching a record period without a Parliamentary by-election; local by-elections don’t even seem to be a good guide to local elections these days, let alone anything else! The only reliable way to tell which poll is producing more accurate results will be to wait until the next general election and see what the actual results are. Sadly, they doesn’t help you much in deciding who is right now.
I’ll give you two warnings. Firstly, it isn’t always the poll that is different from the rest that is wrong. In 1992 Harris was showing a Tory lead when everyone else had Labour ahead. People dismissed Harris as being wrong, the rest is history. Secondly, it is very tempting to believe the poll you want to believe - to see fault in every detail of the methodology of the poll who you really hope isn’t right and the obvious superiority of the poll you hope is true. In few if any cases do I think that people are deliberately talking up polls that favour their own party. I just think that somewhere deep in our subconscious we all tend to will ourselves into finding arguments in favour of the methodology that produces the results we like more convincing 
In the strange interregnum between Blair’s resignation announcement and Gordon Brown’s accession it’s still unclear what the polls signify. In the three polls carried out since Blair stepped down Labour have received a boost in the polls - either at the expense of the Liberal Democrats or the Conservatives. It is impossible to say for sure precisely what is behind most changes in the opinion polls, but personally I suspect this shift was a “Blair boost” - a result of more positive opinions otwards Tony Blair now he is going (there were similar spikes in his scores when he first announced he wouldn’t be seeking a fourth term and after his final conference speech as leader last year).
Today’s YouGov poll for the Telegraph has the Conservative lead back up to 6 points again with topline figures (with changes from YouGov’s last poll - conducted for the Sunday Times just after Blair’s announcement) of CON 39%(+1), LAB 33%(-1), LDEM 15% (nc). The individual changes in voting intentions are not significant, but there doesn’t appear to be a continuing movement towards Labour, if anything things are drifting back to the Conservatives.
I was asked a week or so ago about what I thought would happen in the polls during this period. I said I expected a Blair boost (we one we’ve already seen) followed by a Brown boost from the positive publicity accompanying his rather strange lone leadership campaign and his eventual accession. Perhaps there would be a delay between them and Labour would go up-down-and-up-again, or perhaps they would blend together into one big jump. This pause in Labour’s advance therefore doesn’t necessarily mean that this is their boost from the leadership change and it’s all over - I suspect they’ve got more to come as opinions of Brown improve (temporarily at least). That said, the pause in Labour’s advance could be because the Conservatives have managed to reclaim the media agenda recently with their arguments over selective education - over at Political Betting Mike Smithson think that having David Cameron in the media whether it’s a good or bad story helps the Tories.
Another possible explanation is the different methodology between the pollsters - YouGov’s poll do not include any adjustments for likelihood to vote, ICM, Populus and MORI do. If Labour’s increase in the polls is largely due to Labour supporters being more enthused and saying they are more likely to vote, it wouldn’t make any difference to YouGov’s topline figures. Or - of course, it could just be the normal random variation between polls and not mean much at all!
Meanwhile there are already signs of improvement in perceptions of Brown. On the “Best Prime Minister” question Gordon Brown has caught up and overtaken David Cameron, who he now leads 30% to 27% (with 6% opting for Menzies Campbell). He has also narroed the large Conservative lead on the “forced choice” question of whether - if pushed - people would choose a Conservative government under Cameron or a Labour government under Brown. Cameron’s Tories now lead by only 3 points from a 10 point lead last month. With media focus on the man who has been Chancellor of the Exchequer for ten years, Labour have also moved back ahead as the party most trusted on the economy.
ICM’s monthly poll for the Guardian shows the same sort of recovery in Labour supports as the other polls conducted since Tony Blair’s announcement of his resignation - Labour are up 2 points since last month with overall headline figures of CON 34% (-3), LAB 32% (+2), LDEM 21% (nc). In contrast to the recent YouGov and Populus polls though, the gain in Labour support is at the expense of the Conservatives rather than the Liberal Democrats.
ICM’s poll also suggests there may be some thawing of opinion towards Gordon Brown. In the hypothetical question of how respondents would vote with Gordon Brown as Labour leader the Conservatives still have a far greater lead - in this case 38% to Labour’s 30%. However, the 8 point lead is actually less than the 12 point lead and 15 point lead that the Conservatives secured in comparable questions in the last two ICM polls, so perhaps the Brown PR offensive is beginning to bear some fruit.
As ever, these questions aren’t really compable since normal questions don’t include the names of the party leaders and the mention of David Cameron and Ming Campbell might also be affecting the result - it will be a relief when Gordon Brown does finally become Prime Minister and such questions are no longer necessary! In the meantime I’m really unsure what voting intention polls signify, if anything - are people imagining an election tomorrow with Tony Blair staying on after all, or an election tomorrow with Tony Blair there, but about to resign, or an election tomorrow with Brown already in situ. We don’t know. We’ll have a slightly better idea when Gordon Brown actually becomes Prime Minister and we don’t have to worry about such things, and a much better picture once the initial boost he is likely to get has settled.
There is still a month to go until then though, and little demand for Blair to step down sooner. ICM found that 55% of people wanted Tony Blair to remain until the 27th June as intended, with only 38% wanting him to step down now.
The poll was conducted between the 18-20 May.
MORI’s most recent political monitor included a question asking about how people voted at the last election. Since they don’t use it for weighting purposes, it isn’t a question that MORI regularly ask (or at least, it isn’t one they regularly publish) and it’s a good opportunity to see just how much difference political weighting makes to a poll.
I mention political weighting in polls a lot here, but it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at what it is, why it is done and what difference it makes. In short all polls use methods that are supposed to generate representative samples, i.e. they have the correct number of people from each region in the country, they have the right spread of people in different age brackets, the right mix of men and women and so on. No method is perfect though, so weighting is used to use to iron out the differences. For example, amongst UK adults 52% of the population are female and 48% male. If you had a sample that was 55% female and 45% male you’d have too many women in your sample, so would would weight them down - specifially, you’d make every female respondent count as 0.95 of a person, and every man count as 1.07 of a person, then when you totalled everything up it would be the equivalent of having 52% women and 48% men.
Political weighting is more controversial and more difficult to do because it isn’t clear what the correct proportions are. On age and gender we have figures from the census so we know what the real demographics are. People’s politics we don’t - the best we have is the last general election. We know that in May 2005 around 33% of those who voted backed the Tories, around 36% of voters backed Labour and so on. In theory a pollster should be able to ask respondents how they voted in the last election and then weight the sample so it matches. The problem with this is “false recall” - if you take a panel study, i.e. ask the same group of people how they voted at the last election, and then ask them the same question 6 months later, and then another 6 months later, they should give the same response each time: we can’t, after all, go back and change how we voted. In practice though it has been tried, and the results do change over time. People who didn’t actually vote start pretending they did, people who voted tactically give the name of the party they really supported, people say how they’d have like to have voted rather than how they really did, people who voted for minor parties forget, and so on. Because past recall isn’t fixed in stone and changes in this way it arguably makes it unsuitable to be used as a weighting variable - we never know what the correct picture we should be aiming at is.
So why do all the main phone pollsters still do it? Because they think it’s better than the alternative of just doing nothing. When it comes to actual elections polls without weighting (or some other major adjustment) grossly overestimate the level of Labour support. Without political weighting, if you ask how people voted at the last election you will tend to get answers around CON 26%, LAB 48%, LDEM 17%. Given that this is 7 points below what the Conservatives got at the last election and 12 points above what Labour actually got it seems self evident that such a sample is grossly over-sampling Labour supporters and grossly under-representing Conservative supporters. Some of that discrepancy though is not due to a biased sample, but to false recall, so it isn’t as simple as weighting to the actual result of the last election. Instead the pollsters who use weighting by past vote need to estimate what levels of recalled vote a truly representative sample would produce, and then weight to that. Populus do this by assuming that the difference is roughly 50/50 between sample bias and false recall, and weighting to a point half way between the actual result and the average recalled vote in their unweighted samples. ICM do similar, but put the point closer to the actual results.
Weighting by past vote (or other political weighting) also has the advantage of stability - the make up of the political sample each month is, in theory at least, the same, so if Labour go up 4 points from last month we can be confident that they have actually gone up, rather than us just having a sample with more past Labour voters in it (within the normal bounds of sample error and so on of course).
So where does MORI come into this? MORI don’t weight by past vote because of the concerns about the volatility of past vote recall. They are concerned that past vote recall itself can change from month to month - ICM and Populus’s figures suggest that it is relatively stable over time, but that doesn’t mean it can’t shift in the future. MORI don’t normally use phone polling, they use quota sampling, so there is actually no reason to think their raw samples will resemble the phone samples used by ICM and Populus. Last month’s figures though suggest that they do - MORI’s sample hed recalled vote of CON 27%, LAB 47%, LDEM 19%. Populus’s last poll had unweighted figures of CON 29%, LAB 47%, LDEM 16%; ICM’s last unweighted figures were CON 27%, LAB 47%, LDEM 21%. As you can see, in terms of past vote, all three samples were pretty similar. The difference is that ICM and Populus then both weighted their samples to reduce the proportion of past Labour voters and increase the proportion of past Conservative voters so it was closer to what actually happened at the last election. Specifically, Populus weighted to shares of CON 32%, LAB 39%, LDEM 21% and ICM weighted to shares of CON 32%, LAB 39%, LDEM 22%. Hence ICM and Populus ended up using samples that contained far more Conservative supporters and far fewer Labour supporters than MORI’s sample did.
The topline voting intention figures published in the newspapers by the three pollsters weren’t that different - MORI and ICM both gave the Tories a 7 point lead, Populus a lower 4 point lead - though that was after Blair’s resignation. The reason for this is that MORI add a very strict filter by likelihood to vote - ignoring everyone who doesn’t say they are 10/10 certain to vote - which vastly boosts the Conservatives. Without that filter Labour would have had a 2 point lead.
Via various different adjustments and filters the pollsters all arrive at roughly similar figures for voting intention. The thing to remember here is the effect on all the other political questions - there is no filtering by likelihood to vote on things like approval figures for party leaders, or whether X or Y would make a good Prime Minister. So remember, when you are looking at MORI figures on David Cameron’s approval ratings, or which party would be best on pensions or whatever, they are the opinions of a sample in which around 47% of people who say they voted claim they voted Labour. When you see the same questions in an ICM poll they are the opinions of a sample in which only 39% of respondents who say they voted say they voted Labour. It’s also worth keeping a beady eye on quicky questions done by the phone pollsters on omnibus polls - in ICM and Populus’s monthly polls for the Guardian and the Times with questions on voting intention the sample will always have been weighted by past vote. In polls without voting intention questions they might not have been weighted as such, and they too might have rather more Labour supporters than you’d normally expect.
YouGov/Telegraph - 49% of respondents think that a mixture of grammar schools and secondary moderns is most likely to produce the best education for the most people, 40% think either a fully comprehensive or mix of comprehensive and city academies would be best.
YouGov/Economist - usual picture of perceptions of Brown and Cameron. Brown is seen as more competent and more trusted in a crisis; Cameron as more honest (or more accurately less dishonest!) and more likely to understand people’s problems.
Populus/Times - 45% of people think the Lib Dems would do better if they dumped Sir Menzies Campbell, including 54% of Lib Dem supporters. Normally questions like this produce quite a partisan response with supporters of opposing parties giving hostile answers, but in this case it was Lib Dem supporters who were most negative about Campbell!
Populus/BBC - overwhelming (81%) support for the public smoking ban, although the question asked about enclosed public places and work spaces, it didn’t specifically refer to pubs and restaurants. There was also 62%
support for a ban on smoking while driving and 91% support for a ban on smoking near children.
Finally, in the world of dodgy analysis and reporting of polls, the BBC relays claims from the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education that their survey shows that the number of adults taking part in education has fallen by 500,000 last year. It’s based on the proportion of adults saying they were participating in education falling from 42% last year to 41% this year - the sample size was 5,000 people, so the change isn’t actually statistically significant. They’d have been better off focusing on a significant drop in the number of part time workers in education.
Populus’s May poll for the Times shows a similar pattern to YouGov’s poll last week - Labour have received a boost from the positive publicity following Tony Blair’s resignation, up four points on last month (and as with YouGov, this gives them their highest level of support since the boost after Tony Blair’s final conference speech as leader). The topline figures with changes from last month CON 37%(nc), LAB 33%(+4), LDEM 17%(-3).
As with YouGov though, the hypothetical question of how people will vote with Brown as leader is largely unchanged - the Conservatives under David Cameron retain a ten point lead over Labour under Brown. As I regualrly say, these questions aren’t really comparable to normaly voting intention questions since they have to include the names of all of the leaders, and some of the difference is the effect of naming Cameron in question rather than an anti-Brown effect. Still, the narrowing the Conservative lead in the standard question while the hypothetical question remains largely static does suggest that this is a “Blair boost”, not a Brown one.
Meanwhile the poll showed the usual public perceptions of Brown and Cameron. Brown was seen as stronger than Cameron by 34% to 19%, but Cameron outpolled him on the ‘fluffier’ measures - on charisma (28% to 9%), likeability (30% to 13%) and being in touch with modern Britain (31% to 15%).
The Sunday Times has the first poll of voting intentions since the announcement of Tony Blair’s resignation. The YouGov poll has headline voting intentions, with changes from their last poll, of CON 38%(+1), LAB 34%(+2), LDEM 15%(-3). The poll was carried out between the 10th and 11th of May.
The 34% level of support is the highest Labour have achieved in a YouGov poll since last September, and that was the spike in support following Tony Blair’s final conference speech. You have to go back to before last year’s local elections before Labour were consistently above 33%.
Exactly what voting intention figures at the moment mean is difficult to say. The uplift in Labour support is presumably because of an uplift in Tony Blair’s popularity - it certainly doesn’t appear to be in response to Gordon Brown’s now practically inevitable accession to the leadership, since YouGov also asked how people would vote in an election after Brown became Labour leader and found the Conservatives at 42% to Labour’s 32%.
I’ve often pondered how people respond to opinion polls when the leadership of one of the main parties is in flux - are they imagining an election tomorrow with Blair staying on, or with Blair in situ but resigning in a few weeks, or with Brown already as PM? The sharp contrast in this poll between the normal figures and the figures with Brown certainly suggests that that people aren’t already answering the question imagining Brown as leader, but at some point the figures have to converge to some extent (though not entirely, since the very act of mentioning the party leaders’ names in the question changes the results to some extent). Realistically we aren’t going to have a firm idea of how the parties stand relative to one another until Gordon Brown has not only become Prime Minister, but - assuming he gets a boost in the polls from the surge of positive publicity his accession will envitably provoke - until his immediate honeymoon has died down.
Elsewhere in the poll YouGov found increasingly warm reactions towards Tony Blair now he is standing down. 49% of people thought that, overall, he had been a good Prime Minister, with 46% thinking he had been a poor PM. In his farewell speech in Sedgefield Blair said that he had always done what he thought was right - YouGov found that 66% thought this was true.
UPDATE - Lots more from the Sunday Times poll.
On the record of the last government, 37% of people think they are worse off than 10 years ago, with 34% of people thinking they are better off - so a slight net negative. On crime however 54% of people think they are more at risk compared to only 7% who think they are safer. 58% of people think Britain is a worse place to live in, with only 17% thinking it has improved. People may well have warmer feelings towards Tony Blair now he is standing down, but their perceptions of how well Labour have delivered over the last ten years don’t seem to have improved.
On Gordon Brown, the Sunday Times highlighted that 50% of people thought he was unlikeable, with only 31% liking him. Actually the poll contained a few other questions which painted Brown in a more positive light. 49% thought he was principled, with only 24% thinking him unprincipled, and 46% thought him honest, compared to 26% who thought him mainly dishonest. This re-inforces the picture of Gordon Brown we normally find in polls - people think he is strong, competent, principled and efficient….they just don’t like him.
Finally, 51% of people said they thought Gordon Brown should call an immediate election after taking over. This is down compared to some of the overwhelming majorities picked up in previous polls and responses remain very partisan - 82% of Tories would like a general election, only 21% of Labour voters would. The “Brown as leader” hypothetical question reported in the Sunday Times was actualy asked in this context - how would people vote if Gordon Brown did call an immediate election - the full figures were CON 42%, LAB 32%, LDEM 13%. Most of the churn is actually people who said Labour or Lib Dem on the main voting intention question changing their intention or, more often, saying don’t know.