Unlike the YouGov and Populus polls in recent days an Ipsos-MORI poll in the Observer doesn’t show any sign of a conference boost for Labour - the topline figures with changes from the last MORI poll, conducted directly prior to the Labour conference, are CON 34%(nc), LAB 41%(-1), LDEM 16%(+2) This is an increase for the Lib Dems, but pretty static for the two main parties. There is no indication yet of the exact dates of the fieldwork.
The poll also underlined what is Gordon Brown’s undoubted strength since the Northern Rock crisis - an overwhelming 60% of people think Gordon Brown is best able to handle a crisis compared with only 13% for David Cameron and 9% for Sir Menzies Campbell. Rather cuttingly for David Cameron, amongst Tory voters 37% trusted Brown most in a crisis compared to 32% for Cameron.
A BPIX poll in the Mail on Sunday also shows the Conservatives on 34% and Labour on 41%, but with the Lib Dems down on 12%. It’s the lowest Lib Dem score we’ve seen for a long while, but that’s to be expected. We don’t know what weightings they do use, but we do know from their polls last year that they tend to produce figures with the Lib Dems considerably lower than in other polls.
UPDATE - the full results of the MORI poll are now up on their website here, with one very interesting finding. A week or two ago we were told that Labour’s private polling showed them 7 or 8 points ahead, but asked how people would vote in an autumn election it shot up to a 14 point lead. We have no way of testing such claims of course, but MORI asked a similar question in this poll. From CON 34%, LAB 41%, LDEM 16% in the normal voting intention poll, asked how people would vote in an autumn election the figures changed to CON 35%, LAB 40%, LDEM 16%. It’s not a huge shift - Labour’s lead is only 2 points lower - but it contradicts the idea that Labour would have an even bigger lead in an immediate election.
When YouGov gave Labour an eleven point lead in the week I think most people were somewhat sceptical, and rightly so - it was a snap poll with less than the normal sample size conducted in a hurry straight after Gordon Brown’s conference speech. A new YouGov poll in Saturday’s Telegraph however confirms the change and is backed up by a Populus poll showing a ten point lead.
The topline voting intention figures from YouGov, with changes from the mid week poll, are CON 32%(-1), LAB 43%(-1), LDEM 15%(+2). Compared to the last full YouGov poll from before the Labour party (probably a more sound comparison, given that the last poll was just a snapshot poll with less than the usual sample size) the changes are CON minus 1, Labour up 4 and the Liberal Democrats minus 1. The poll was conducted between Wednesday and Friday.
Populus’s poll has headline figures of CON 31%(-5), LAB 41%(+4), LDEM 17%(-1). Until now Populus had been showing slightly higher figures for the Conservatives than other pollsters, putting them in the mid thirties while everyone else had them down in the low thirties - this brings them into line with the sort of figures other companies have been showing.
Of course these polls are still likely to be showing a short term boost from Gordon Brown’s speech and the publicity given to it, but we can at least be confident now that it’s a real change, not just the random vagueries of a small poll conducted in a hurry.
A double point lead for Labour must make the pressure for an early poll almost irresistable for Gordon Brown - supposedly he is making the decision this weekend - and no doubt there will be more polls during the weekend for him to ponder over, at the very least a new Ipsos-MORI poll is due on Sunday.
While the polling evidence is strongly in Labour’s favour, the evidence in the other direction is from the local council by-election results mid-week which were very positive for the Conservatives, especially in marginal seats like Corby and Dover. How do we square opinion poll results showing a huge Labour lead with local council by-elections showing swings to the Conservatives?
Some people swear by local by-election results as a way of predicting elections, I have always been rather dismissive of them. They are on a much lower turnout, they are often skewed by particular local factors (a big Labour victory in Worcester a week ago was probably partially due to the revelation that the Tory candidate wrote ran a website devoted to erotic fiction, I’d warrant some of these by-elections had there own local causes too!), people vote differently at local elections to national elections (if nothing else, there is a tendency for the Lib Dems to do better and Labour worse) and to a large extent they are probably decided by local campaigning strength and ability, rather than the bigger national picture. Added to that there aren’t actually very many of them and the picture you get from week to week varies according to where happens to have had a by-election.
If, for the sake of argument, they are a pointer, then why the difference? Perhaps it is a sign that the Conservatives are indeed doing better in marginals, and the huge Labour leads in the polls are because of core Labour voters in the inner cities being enthused. Perhaps it is because the swing to Labour is largely amongst people who probably will not, in the event, vote. I’m sticking with the explanation that they actually just aren’t a very good predictor.
I don’t see any reason to think that the polls aren’t an accurate reflection of current public opinion. If you are a Conservative supporter, then I wouldn’t advise you to take succour from local by-election results. The only comfort I can offer is that these figures are from polls conducted immediately after the publicity boost of Labour conference, if the Conservatives have a good conference then may yet see their own boost in the polls.
Labours press office seem to have made great things of the cross breaks of the last YouGov poll, since it showed a whopping 17 point lead amongst female voters. I’ve seen various articles by commentators* who have been briefed about it showing how women has defected en masse to Labour. Is it true?
The graph below shows the Labour lead in all YouGov’s polls this year - the black line is their overall lead, the blue line the lead amongst men, the pink line their lead amongst women.
As you can see, the lines bounce about a bit - they have only half the sample size of the overall figures, so that’s to be expected - but generally speaking Labour has had a LOWER lead amongst women over the last 9 months. Those last figures stick out like a sore thumb - it could be a sudden surge in Labour’s support amongst women, but I suspect it’s more likely to just be the result of it being a snap poll with half the normal sample size. You should be careful about reading too much into the internal breaks in polls anyway, if you see something really strange and unusual in the internal breaks of a poll, the chances are its wrong.
That aside, the early election speculation rumbles on. The Guardian’s coverage of this poll included the news that “Some party whips were also claiming that an early poll might mean the contest could be fought on old parliamentary boundaries, a way of preserving as many as 15 seats for Labour”. If they are claiming that they’ll be sorely disappointed, the boundary changes went through almost three months ago now.
Plus, over on the UK Polling Report Election Guide, I’ve added an article on what could be some key seats to watch at the next election.
A snap YouGov poll with fieldwork conducted on Monday afternoon through to Tuesday - so directly after Gordon Brown’s conference speech - has headline figures of CON 33% (nc), LAB 44% (+5!), LDEM 13% (-3).
The Conservative figure is believable enough, but the Liberal Democrat and Labour figures are extreme - the highest Labour figure recorded by YouGov (and indeed by any pollster) since 2002 and the lowest YouGov Liberal Democrat score since the depths experienced after Charles Kennedy’s removal. On a uniform swing these figures would give Labour a stonking majority of 140, put the Lib Dems down on 31 seats and the Conservatives on 197.
How seriously should we treat it? Well, it’s a snap poll, taken while Brown’s speech was still rumbling in respondents’ ears, there is very clearly a conference speech boost to Labour’s support, largely at the expense of Liberal Democrat voters. Gordon Brown’s first speech may very well give Labour a lasting boost in the polls, but this isn’t it - my guess is that this is just the transitory boost from the speech, exaggerated by doing the whole poll within 24 hours straight afterwards.
If you look over at the voting intention graph, you’ll see a similar sudden spike in Labour’s support at their last conference that put them equal with the Conservatives from being 7 points behind a week before. It faded away, I expect this one will too. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s really going to pile on the pressure for and speculation around an early election (despite the fact the poll also showed that only 29% of respondents wanted one this autumn) and it’s a horrid backdrop for David Cameron going into his party conference next week. If another poll doesn’t come out telling a different story, he’ll be addressing his second conference as leader with the albatross of an 11 point poll deficit hung around his neck. Ouch.
A new Ipsos-MORI poll in the Sun on Monday has voting intentions of CON 34%(-2), LAB 42%(+1), LDEM 14%(-2). There are no dates available for the fieldwork yet - sometimes MORI’s polls do take slightly longer to reach the papers, especially the monthly face-to-face polls, so this may have been taken prior to the ICM and YouGov polls that were published over the weekend.
The 42% recorded for Labour’s support equals their highest level of support so far this Parliament - a level last reached in a MORI poll back in 2005 before David Cameron became Conservative leader. 14% is the lowest the Liberal Democrats have recorded from MORI this Parliament and, though we won’t know until we find out the fieldwork dates, it might well have been despite being conducted during their conference. As I said in my predictions for what would happen in an early election, I suspect the Liberal Democrats are suffering as they once did through a lack of media profile, and that in the event of an election campaign they would probably do better than this.
The poll also supposedly contains a varient on the voting intention question asking how people would vote if Gordon Brown offered a referendum on the EU Treaty which gives Labour a 17 point lead. When, a few months ago, all the polls used to contain a question asking how people would vote if Gordon Brown was leader I got bored to my back teeth of religiously adding a caveat about them being purely hypothetical questions and that the public aren’t actually very good at predicting how they’ll react to future events. Given how accurate they were at predicting a hypothetical future then, I trust everyone will give the appropriate pinch of salt to this hypothetical voting intention question.
UPDATE: The poll was conducted between the 20th and 22nd of September, so is bang up to date. There was also a question that asked how people would vote if Brown ruled out a referendum on the EU treaty which showed Labour’s lead slipping to only 1 point. I’d dismiss this question along with the one above! More interestingly the poll also suggests a far, far lower lead for the no camp when people were asked how they’d vote in a referendum on the EU treaty, finding that 38% would vote against it and 32% in favour. This is but a single poll, and others have all shown a much bigger lead for the No camp, but it does suggest that such a referendum could potentially be winnable for Brown.
An ICM poll in the Sunday Mirror has voting intention figures, with changes from their poll taken at the very height of the Northern Rock crisis, of CON 33%(+1), LAB 39%(-1), LDEM 19%(-1). The change in this poll alone is not significant, but it is similar to ICM’s findings from before Northern Rock so it does echo the YouGov poll from yesterday which showed there was pretty much no effect on voting intentions from the brief banking crisis.
Everything I’m hearing is that it’s increasingly likely that there will be an election called during the next fortnight, possibly next week. My own best guess was that, if Brown was going to call an election this year (which I didn’t think he would!) he’d have done it the day after the Conservative conference with polling day on November 1st. All the same, if he does call an election, what is the result likely to be?
First off, what are the parties standings in the polls? Apart from Populus, who have the Conservatives up at 36, the Conservatives have been around 32, 33, 34 in the last few polls. Labour have, having fallen back at the end of August, gone back up to the high thirties. The Liberal Democrats are, with the exception of ICM, in the mid-teens (and I’ll come to them in more detail later). Overall the postion appears to be something like CON 33%, LAB 39%, LDEM 16-17%. On a straight uniform swing that would produce a House of Commons with 201 Conservative MPs, 379 Labour MPs and 42 Lib Dem MPs, a Labour majority of 108.
I sometimes ponder whether to keep a running prediction on the website somewhere, there are two reasons I don’t. Firstly, voting intention polls really are hypothetical, they ask how people would vote in an election tomorrow and there isn’t an election tomorrow. If there was, then the last three weeks would have been full of campaigning and equal treatment of the parties on the news broadcasts. Secondly I don’t think there is any nice formula you can plug numbers into and get a prediction - swing calculators need to be tempered with insight and I don’t think an election call today would produce a Labour majority of 108. Here’s why:
1) The Liberal Democrats won’t do THAT badly. A hallowed piece of psephological wisdom is that Liberal Democrats always pick up support during an election campaign. It isn’t necessarily true and it depends where you draw the line from. They didn’t in 1987 because they had a rubbish campaign, they might have in 2005, but it depends where you draw the line. Compared to the polls immediately prior to Tony Blair announcing the election, they went up by about 2 points, if you compare it to their poll ratings earlier in the Parliament though they fell slightly. If you go back a couple of elections the increase is partly artifical - pollsters like MORI used to start prompting with party name half way through the election campaign when candidate names were known, giving the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors an artifical boost of a couple of points. All that aside, the reason for what Lib Dem boost there has sometimes been is that mid-Parliament people forget about them as a viable option and forget they may actually vote tactically for them in their local contest, but during an election campaign when they are doorstepping people and the BBC is compelled to give them fair coverage they pick up support. In the last Parliament Charlie Kennedy was a high profile leader and the issue of Iraq got them plenty of publicity, they didn’t have a lack of publicity to start with so couldn’t recover from it. This time round they’ve been relegated to the political sidelines for much of the Parliament, so with TV coverage guaranteed they will probably bounce back somewhat.
My suspicion is that YouGov show lower levels of Lib Dem support because their sample more accurately reflects who actually votes Liberal Democrat, that lots of them don’t have any identification with the Lib Dems and are protest votes and tactical votes and hence far more likely to forget about them away from elections. But those same people who are more likely to switch to the Lib Dems are there in YouGov’s samples. My guess is that the gap between ICM and the others will narrow, and Lib Dems will come up to about 19/20% in all the polls…and that the gain in their support will come at the expense of Labour.
2) The double incumbency bonus. All MPs build up some sort of personal vote from people they’ve helped and people who they’ve come across in their work. It probably isn’t that much, a couple of thousand votes at most, but it’s enough to make the difference in marginal seats. It will be most noticable for new MPs who gained their seat at the last election. In theory a new Conservative MP elected at the last election will have built up a personal vote in the past two and a half years, meanwhile, unless the defeated MP from 2005 is contesting the seat again, Labour will have lost the personal vote they enjoyed last time round. The projection above includes Labour gaining 24 seats from the Conservatives. Some of those are purely notional gains of seats they already hold like Portsmouth North, but in many other cases like Kettering, Shipley, Hemel Hempstead, Gravesham, Enfield Southgate they are seats that were taken by the Conservatives at the last election. These will have a double incumbency bonus and the Conservatives will probably hold on to some seats they would theoretically lose on a straight swing.
3) Where exactly is the increase in Labour support? Uniform swing calculations assume just that - that the swing is uniform. If what has actually happened is that the Conservatives have gained in the south and Labour have gained in the north and the midlands, it gives a misleading picture. There are more marginal seats in the south than the north, so if a party is doing disproportionately better in the south, they’ll do better in terms of seats than the uniform swing suggests.
We don’t have much evidence to judge this by - there is only the aggregated ICM data since Brown became leader that suggested the Conservatives were doing much better in the south. That alone isn’t much to go on, but it does tally with evidence from before Brown’s accession that suggested David Cameron had increased Conservative support in the south, but fallen flat in the north. If this pattern does hold true (and even more so if Brown’s appeal is a mirror image to Cameron and he’s done disproportionately well in the north) it will help the Conservatives. If the Conservatives do very badly in the north it may not harm them much in seats, they don’t have many to lose.
What holds true for broad regions of the country, could also hold true with demographic groups. If Gordon Brown’s increased support is based on core Labour voters who had sat on their hands at the end of Blair’s tenure returning home, his increased support may be concentrated in inner-city Labour heartlands where it will be of no use to him.
4) The campaign. This one can cut either way of course, but I’d be remiss not to mention the actual campaign and what difference it could make. The 2005 election campaign had barely any effect on people’s voting intentions: realisticially the parties may as well have stayed at home and just burnt several million pounds. Polls over the last couple of months though have been very volatile, from a Conservative lead Brown opened up a large Labour lead, which in turn faded away when crime rose up the agenda and then shot back up at the sight of economic problems. Politics is in flux - public opinion may not be so unchanging as it was in 2005.
Labour will want to campaign on Gordon Brown being the strong, reliable leader that the country needs when there could be trouble ahead, contrasting him with a weak and shallow David Cameron. At the moment Brown himself and the economy, despite the wobbles, are their strong cards. He’ll be saying that the country needs a strong, experienced hand at the tiller, not some flip-flopping, inexperienced, jejune pr boy - now give him the mandate to do the job.
There was some suggestion that the Conservatives would paint an early election as Brown running to the country in advance of impending economic disaster. If they did it would be suicide, we’ve seen that in economic troubles people trust Brown. The Conservatives need to try and fight the election against Labour, not against Brown. Polls show positive ratings for Brown, but the government’s approval ratings is still strongly negative. While Labour will want the election to be a choice between strong Gordon and weak Dave, the Conservatives should try to completely ignore Brown and make it an election about choosing an alternative route to the tired, worn out Labour government that’s wasted away 10 years with nothing to show. To do that they desparately need to offer an external narrative, explain what they want for Britain, rather than the internal narrative about changing the Conservative party they’ve offered for 2 years. They need to say what they are changing it for.
A good campaign from either of the main parties (or campaign calamities from either) could change the picture, people aren’t yet certain about Brown, views can change.
5) How accurate are the polls? The short answer is that they are very accurate these days - NOP got it bang on in 2005. The fact remains however that the tiny errors that the rest did display were all in Labour’s favour. There can be no criticism of individual pollsters’ performance in 2005, they were all within the margin of error, as close as they can reasonably be expected to be. However, as a collective group the errors were all in favour of Labour. If the polls were perfectly accurate, there should have been some slightly too favourable to Labour and some slightly too favourable to the Conservatives, a random distribution either side of the real result. There wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, this will not be 1992 and the polls will be very close to the real result. What errors there are will only be in the region of percentage point or two, but the difference between Labour being 4 points ahead or 6 points ahead is a very large one in terms of seats.
All of these are non-quantifiable to some degree and many could work both ways - it’s just as likely that Labour will “win” the campaign as it is the Conservatives will and we can’t judge regional differences in support - it could be that it’s Labour who are doing better in the southern marginals. However, just taking what I think is the likely swing to the Liberal Democrats during the campaign and the slight tendency in the polls to favour Labour means Labour’s lead at an actual election could end up being around 3 points or so, the same as in 2005. The double incumbency effect will help the Conservatives in some of the very close marginals, perhaps worth another 5 seats or so, boundary changes mean Labour are defending only a notional 36 seat majority anyway…
On the present polls an election next month will see Labour returned as the largest party, but beyond that nothing’s certain.
A new YouGov poll in Saturday’s Telegraph has voting intentions (with changes from the poll last weekend) of CON 33%(-1), LAB 39%(nc), LDEM 16%(+1). The previous YouGov poll was largely conducted before Northern Rock, this was conducted between the 19th and 21st of September making it the first full voting intention poll conducted entirely since Northern Rock.
It’s pretty clear that the poll shows no significant change from the Northern Rock affair, the Liberal Democrat conference has also had a minor effect at best, with a rise of a single point. While the leads aren’t hugely different - 8 points as opposed to 6 points - it is actually painting a different picture to ICM - ICM showed the largest Labour lead yet, this poll is still down from the peak of the Brown boost. It’s probably not methodological differences: since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister YouGov have tended to be the pollster who produce the largest Labour leads, certainly they’ve tended to show larger leads than ICM. Perhaps its just because ICM’s poll was conducted at the very height of the crisis and people rallied to Gordon Brown as the strong leader… and now the crisis seems to be over they’ve returned to their previous views.
Specifically on Northern Rock 52% of people thought the government handled it well, with 37% disagreeing. The vast majority of people don’t seem to be worried about the security of their savings, 74% say they are not very worried or not worried at all, and only 3% say they are very worried. The effect of Northern Rock on other underlying scores is negative for Labour, but only marginally so - Brown’s lead as best Prime Minister is down 2 points from the last YouGov poll to ask the question, but that still leaves it at an inpressive 22 points. Labour’s lead on the economy is down 4 points, but that still leaves it at a healthy 8 points.
All things considered, Labour appear to have emerged unscathed from the Northern Rock incident. A six point lead must be on the margin of Brown calling an October election - it doesn’t take much of a Lib Dem campaign recovery at Labour’s expense or a couple of campaign tumbles to move it into majority losing territory. On the other hand, what was previously a very soft Labour lead has now been tested against a banking crisis and survived. Tim Montgomerie and Iain Dale are both reporting that the Conservative party is on red alert for an election announcement as soon as Monday.
This is interesting - an ICM poll in Wednesday’s Guardian has voting intentions of CON 32%(-2), LAB 40% (+1), LDEM 20% (+2). It was conducted between the 13th and 16th, so a lot of it would have been after the Northern Rock difficulties started to dominate the news agenda. It’s early of course, public opinion can take a while to digest events, but as an early sign it suggests the sign of economics wobbles is boosting Labour support rather than damaging it.
It seemed to be echoed by a snap Populus poll taken on Monday afternoon, after a day in which the TV news was full of footage of huge queues outside the stricken bank. The full results aren’t up on the Times’s site yet, but Peter Riddell’s analysis mentions that only 20% of people blamed the government (and I’d warrent those are largely Conservative supporters anyway) and that the proportion of people who think Brown and Darling are the best team in an economic crisis is still up at 56%, down from 61% before the recent troubles (and Cameron/Osborne are also down, so Brown’s lead is actually bigger than before).
The 8 point lead in ICM’s poll really does put the possiblity of a snap election back on the table. All along my prediction has been that there will not be an election this year, that there simply wasn’t the time available for it to be demonstrated to Gordon Brown’s satisfaction that a Labour lead was truly consistent, and wasn’t a temporary bounce and wouldn’t fade away in the heat of an election campaign. Iff this sort of lead is echoed in several more polls in coming days though (and the very fact of this large lead, and the Northern Rock affair means that more polls will probably be commissioned) then perhaps, just perhaps…
UPDATE: The Guardian headlines on leader approval figures and the supposed swing against Cameron. This is actually rather small. Assuming the wording of the questions was the same, when ICM asked leadership approval questions last month for the Sunday Mirror David Cameron’s leadership was approved of by 38% of voters, with 42% disapproving. This poll has 37% approving of his leadership, an insignificant change, and 45% disapproving - a change in his net rating from -4 to -8. Over the same period, Gordon Brown’s approval ratings have dropped from +40 to +32. Alas, Sir Menzies Campbell, whose net rating is now marginally above Cameron’s, was not asked about last time, so we can’t draw out any changes. No doubt that Brown is still riding high and Cameron’s in the doldrums, but it’s always worth looking at the figures rather than the headlines.
ICM also has figures for best party on issues, which seem to show Labour head on everything, even Conservative core issues like crime and immigration (albiet, by very small margins). The most notable figure there though is a huge 25 point Labour lead on the economy. For a poll taken almost at the height of a banking crisis, this certainly supports the hypothesis that people have rallied to Gordon Brown as a safe pair of economic hands.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next poll - this was conducted before the crisis stabilised, so Labour may well get a further boost from being seen to have successfully handled the problem. On the other hand, if people have rallied to Brown at a time of economic crisis, they may clear off again once the problem has passed. On top of all of that, we should remember it is just a single poll, we may all be getting excited about an outlying poll that just happened to co-incide with a mayor news story!
A ComRes poll in the Independent has headline voting intention figures, with changes from their last poll, of CON 34%(-2), LAB 37%(+1), LDEM 15%(nc). Like YouGov yesterday it shows a widening of the Labour lead (or in this case, a re-establishment of it). While the changes in YouGov’s poll alone weren’t enough to be confident that anything had changed, the addition of this poll begins to suggest a pattern of labour widening their lead once again.
Unfortunately the poll was conducted on Monday and Tuesday last week, so is actually older than the weekend’s YouGov poll and considerably prior to Northern Rock’s difficulties. We await the first poll to give us any real idea of what political impact, if any, the economic wobbles of the last couple of days has had.
Note that in the Independent’s coverage of the poll they say that, if repeated at a general election on a uniform swing, these figures would reduce the Lib Dems to 13 seats. This is wrong: the Independent’s figures are based on the Electoral Calculus calculator which uses a modified proportional swing, on a uniform swing these results would produce a House of Commons with 229 for the Conservatives, 353 seats for Labour and 39 seats for the Liberal Democrats.