ComRes have released their monthly poll for the Independent. The full tables are here. The topline figures, with changes from ComRes’s December poll are CON 38%(-3), LAB 30%(nc), LDEM 17%(+1).
The pattern here is in line with the recent YouGov and ICM polls - the Conservatives down, Labour largely stuck in the low thirties, a slight rise in the Lib Dem score. This poll was conducted between 25th and 27th January, so it is the first poll conducted entirely after Peter Hain’s resignation and - as yet - there is no obvious damage to Labour’s support.
Monday’s Telegraph published the economic part of their monthly YouGov poll (it also had the best Prime Minister question, which gave David Cameron a 4 point lead over Brown).
Reports of economic questions in polls are always a bit lacking. They inevitably show that everyone thinks we are headed for hell in a handbasket (if they don’t, the papers don’t bother emphasising them), and findings like 56% of people think the economy are reported without much context at all. Is that really bad historically, or are we just a doom-laden bunch of miseries convinced that we’re doomed anyway. The Telegraph article does give a bit of context, it says they’re the worst figures since 1994, but since YouGov has only been polling since 2001 or so that comparison itself raises questions (presumably they are comparing to Gallup, the Telegraph’s old pollsters, which is a poor show).
Looking at YouGov’s question on whether people think the Economic will get better or worse, this month 56% of people thought it would get worse, with only 17% expecting it to improve - a net score (the so-called “feel good factor”) of minus 39. This is indeed the lowest YouGov have registered since they began the tracker in 2003. Looking at the graph below you can see the lines look pretty consistent until September 2007, the month of the Northern Rock collapse. Since then they have been trending negatively. I make no judgement about what state the economy is actually in, but since September the public have clearly been more and more convinced that it’s in trouble.
But what about some context? They may be the worst figures since YouGov began tracking in 2003, but those 5 years have been pretty benign economically. To go back further, lets look at the same question from MORI, who have trackers going all the way back to 1979. Ipsos MORI’s most recent figures showed 55% expected things to get worse, with only 9% expecting an improvement - a feel good factor of minus 46 - and here’s the graph showing the historical figures.
This doesn’t give much comfort to the government. As you can see, people do in general tend to be pretty pessimistic. There are a couple of points where there is a net positive rating (after the 1997 Labour landslide or the 1987 Tory victory, for example) but most of the time we’re comparing different extremes of pessimism.
There are recent drops to compare to current figures - the rating was worse than it is now as recently as February 2003 (the impending war in Iraq perhaps?), it hit what really was the lowest rating since 1979 after September 11th 2001. There is another dip in 1998 that I can’t think of an obvious explanation for. After Black Wednesday in 1992 the net figure was down to -46, the same as it is now and in the dog-days of the end of the Thatcher government in summer 1990 it had descended to a similar level. Before that you need to go back to 1979 - whatever economic turmoil and recessions there were in the early 80s, people were more optimistic about the economy than they are now.
For the majority of the time the figures vary between 0 and minus 30, it normally drops below that score only for brief extreme reactions to unusual events (often non-economic ones that have just shook confidence in general) - the only real exceptions are way back in 1979, the end of Thatcher, and the last year or two when it has sunk below that figure several times.
Compared to ratings in the past, economic optimism really is very low indeed - perhaps even irrationally so. Still, I’m not an economist and I don’t pretend to know what state the economy is actually in, but in terms of public perception things are very bleak indeed.
One getout clause for the government on this is that people do not necessarily blame a poor economic outlook on the government. Populus ask a semi-regular question on whether people think the economy is doing well, and whether or not that is attributable to Gordon Brown. The last time I can find it is back in December 2006, when they found 51% though the economy was doing well, and 40% thought it was doing badly. 47% thought the state of the economy was due to Brown, 44% thought it wasn’t much to do with him.
It maybe that the public with accept that harder economic times are due to the world economy, and not pin any blame on the government of the day. On one level I am sure that’s the case, but on another level I suspect it doesn’t matter. My guess is that hard times will gradually sap support for the government of the day across the board, even if people do not directly blame the government for specific economic problems.
Polls by ICM and YouGov both show the Conservatives falling slightly and a boost for the Lib Dems under their new leader. YouGov in the Telegraph has topline figures of CON 41%(-2), LAB 33%(nc), LDEM 16%(+2), ICM for the Guardian have figures of CON 37%(-3), LAB 35%(+2), LDEM 20%(+2). The 2 point Tory lead from ICM is the lowest in any poll since back in November.
The ICM poll was conducted last weekend, so before both the lastest on Northern Rock, and Peter Hain’s resignation. YouGov’s poll was carried out at the start of the week, so would have taken in Northern Rock, but not Hain.
While YouGov’s figures are obviously a lot nicer for the Tories and a lot less nice for the Lib Dems than ICM’s, but we should be used to the differences produced by the pollsters different methods. The important thing is that the trend is the same.
A new YouGov poll for ITV London has topline voting intentions for the London mayoral election of Livingstone 44%(-1), Johnson 40%(-4), Paddick 8%(+1). I can’t find the exact dates of the poll yet, but press reports suggest it was conducted after the Channel 4 Dispatches programme criticising Ken Livingstone, and the preceeding couple of weeks of agressive attacks on Livingstone by the Evening Standard.
If the poll was done after the programme, it suggests that so far it hasn’t actually made any significant impact upon his support. Rather it seems to be the “others” who are gaining support - though at around 8% their total is still very low compared to the 18% minor parties got at the last mayoral election, albeit, that was probably partially to do with the election falling on the same day as the European elections and the consequential boost for UKIP.
Incidentally, Ken Livingstone’s campaign responded by saying “This is a welcome opening up of Ken’s lead, especially as internet polling has always underestimated Ken’s support compared with actual elections and other opinion polls.” In terms of comparisons with actual elections they are wrong. The 2000 election was before YouGov’s time, so there is only 2004 to compare with, and in polls conducted on the same basis as this one, YouGov called that one exactly right.
Judging from a similiar comment after the last poll, I think the Livingstone campaign are basing their claim on the fact that a YouGov poll prior to the last Mayoral election showed Steve Norris only 2 points behind Ken when really he ended up ten points behind. What actually happened in 2004 was that the final YouGov poll showed both figures for all respondents, and figures for only those certain to vote. The figures for all respondents correctly predicted a 10 point Livingstone victory, the figures for only those certain to vote underestimated Livingstone’s support. These recent polls are based on all respondents, not just those certain to vote - so the comparison should with the figures that correctly predicted the 2004 result.
UPDATE: The full figures are up on YouGov’s website here. Two things are worth noting. Firstly there is a breakdown of the “others” vote and, despite the rise since the last poll, there is no sign of any of the fringe candidates sticking out above the others. The highest figure is UKIP on 2%. More important to note is the very small sample size. The poll was of only 339 people, about a third of the size of the last poll. Given that a third of respondents were excluded from the final figures because they didn’t give voting intentions, these figures are based on only around 240 people. The margin of error on these figures is huge, so we probably shouldn’t read too much into changes or lack of them after all.
I have added a page listing polls on support for Scottish independence here (and linked from the sidebar). It’s a question that produces some wildly differing responses, allowing people to argue that the polls show almost anything they want. It tends to be asked about in at least four different ways, they all show different things and pollsters aren’t consistent over time in what they ask, so it’s hard to pick up a trend. So, what can we tell about the actual state of public opinion?
When respondents are asked to choose from a broad range of options - complete independence, increased powers for the Scottish Parliament, the status quo or the abolition of the Scottish Parliament - we almost always find that complete independence is only the preferred option of somewhere between a quarter and a third of people in Scotland. The favoured option is nearly always to retain the Scottish Parliament but give it increased tax raising powers. This is one instance were the same question can be tracked over time, since it is asked every year in the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey. The most recent figures show 23% of people in favour of independence, 55% in favour of a Parliament with tax raising powers, 8% in favour of the status quo and 10% in favour of the Scottish Parliament being abolished and a return to Westminster rule.
The only question that consistently produces a plurality in favour of Scottish independence is in response to the straightforward question of whether respondents are in favour of Scotland becoming a country independent of the UK. Responses vary over time, but more often than not the balance is in favour of independence.
These have been quite simple questions though - independence or not. Questions that have given respondents more technical or more tightly defined options, asking them to say how they would vote in a referendum to chose between an independent Scotland outside of the United Kingdom, or retaining the Scottish Parliament as it is now, have tended to show a slim overall majority opposed to independence with support for full independence down to around a third.
Two possible explanations for the difference suggest themselves to me. Firstly I suspect that the straightforward “do you support independence” style questions are getting an emotional, gut response driven by patriotism. They are people saying that Scotland is a country in its own right, rather than people thinking about the constitutional arrangements for governing that country. The other possiblity that strikes me is the mention of the Scottish Parliament - in the simpler questions it is a choice between an independent Scotland or some unspecified alternative…when the alternative is spelt out as being the existing Scottish parliament, some respondents are presumably of the view that they are happy with that.
What is the best representation of Scottish opinion? Well in many ways they are just measuing different things - it can be both true that the preferred option is a Parliament with tax-raising powers, but given a forced choice between independence or the status quo people would plump for the latter. In practical terms though public support for Scottish independence is important purely because the day may come when people in Scotland vote on it in a referendum, and since the SNP last year set out what sort of question they would ask in a referendum, we can see what people think about that.
Referendum voting intention polls this far out aren’t particularly reliable - like general election polls they can only tell us how people would vote if there was a referendum tomorrow…and there isn’t. In real life if there was a referendum tomorrow there would have been a couple of weeks of campaigning beforehand and who knows how opinion would have changed once people considered the arguments. For now though, polls using the sort of wording that the SNP have suggested for a referendum show a lead for NO voters, though varying in size between 20 points and a narrow 4 point lead. Given the underlying preference for a beefier Scottish Parliament over full independence, I’m more inclined to believe the former, but who knows what would happen during a campaign.
Earlier in the week there was apparently a new YouGov poll of Scottish voting intentions in the Scottish Daily Express. The topline voting intention figures, with changes from the last YouGov poll, are - for the constituency vote - CON 14%(+2), LAB 29%(nc), LDEM 14%(+1), SNP 38%(-2) and for the regional vote, CON 13%(nc), LAB 27%(+1), LDEM 12%(-1), SNP 30%(-4).
Not having seen the actual tables yet I assuming that the figures are comparable, though as we’ve seen in the past, YouGov have sometimes asked about Scottish voting intention in different ways depending on whether smaller parties are prompted for the in question, so we can’t be certain. If they are the picture appears to be largely static, with the SNP just beginning to fall slightly.
Other questions in the poll found support for independence stood at 27% in a question that also offered the current Scottish Parliament as an option (chosen by 57%). In the past questions that offer the Scottish Parliament as an alternative normally show a lower level of support for independence than ones which ask a straight yes or no question. Finally 45% of respondents thought Scotland should become a republic were it to become independence, 39% would rather retain the Queen as Head of State.
The full results of the YouGov poll are still up on their website here. As usual they asked a wide variety of subjects, so here’s a run down of some of the other findings.
Gordon Brown’s figures continue to plummet, his net “good job” in the YouGov poll for the Sunday Times was down to -20, as compared to -10 in November. Cameron’s figures are up at plus 25. There were figures for Nick Clegg, but so far these mean very little indeed, with well over half of respondents saying don’t know.
Less good for Cameron was one of those focus group style questions asking what animal people thought politicians resembled: Brown was seen as a bear, a nice strong image there. Cameron was seen as a snake, oh dear.
In reality these questions aren’t really suited to a quantative survey, it depends too much on what options you give them, I remember arguing about the wording for we did about whether tortoise should be included in the list, since it was so obvious it was just leading people to give that negative response about Ming Campbell. In this case there was one very obvious “positive” animal for Brown, so Labour supporters all said bear - negative repsonses from Conservative supporters were split between things like Ostrich, Hippo and snake. For Cameron it was the opposite, negative responses were concentrated on snake, but positive responses from Tory supporters were split between leopard and bear (neither of which are particularly Cameronish). If the question tells us anything, it is that for those who still have a positive view of Brown, his qualities are very well defined. In Cameron’s case his negatives are well defined, but his positives aren’t. (My favourite outcome in one of these comparison questions was an ICM focus group that found Cameron was seen as a some upmarket BMW saloon car, the type slightly flashy salesmen would drive. Ming Campbell was a nice old Jaguar. Brown was a tank.)
Moving on, the Sunday Times poll also covered nuclear power. Asked if they approved of a new generation of nuclear power stations to replace current ones, a majority (59%) approved, with 27% opposed. Conservative supporters were most supportive, but even a plurality of supporters of the Lib Dems - the only one of the three main parties to oppose the plans - were in favour, 48% to 39%. Overall 39% of respondents thought the proportion of Britain’s energy needs filled by nuclear power should increase in the future, 17% though it should stay the same, 25% though it should be reduced or entirely phased out.
It’s worth pointing out again the unusual contrasts between men and women on the issue of nuclear power. On most issues men and women think much the same, nuclear power is an exception. Men overwhelmingly favoured the decision to build a new generation of nuclear plants by 74% to 20%, women were far more cautious, with the balance in favour 44% to 32% against.
The Sunday Times also did a series of questions on “rip off Britain”, which had a nuggest of good news for the big supermarkets, who were very much the whipping boy last year. Overwhelming majorities of respondents thought that the public were ripped off by petrol companies, rail companies, dentists, banks and local councils…supermarkets alone broke the trend, with 61% of people thinking the public got a good deal from them.
Finally there were a couple of “are you are heartless unfeeling bastard?” questions. 57% of people claimed they paid great attention to the way food they bought had been produced. 60% said they would pay £1 extra for chickens reared in more humane conditions.
Questions like this where there is an option that is obviously the more socially desirable invariably give worthless results, it’s so much easier to say it in a survey than actually fork out the money. Have sales of non-free range chicken collapsed as over 60% of consumers spurn them for more humane alternatives? Of course not, the supermarkets report sales of chicken slightly up, with Tesco saying the proportion of customers buying their Willow Farm bird which have a higher standard of welfare are “slightly up”.
My favourite example of this type of question was done by Populus after the Boxing Day tsunami, they asked respondents how much money people in their household had donated to the relief effort…and came up with a figure considerably larger than the actual donations made by the entire country. People will very rarely tell pollsters they are heartless bastards.
Through December there were some somewhat contradictory polls - we saw YouGov putting the Conservatives way up at 45%, then an ICM poll showing Labour recovering. That was followed by a YouGov poll that also showed Labour recovering…but that was taken in the few days before Christmas when it’s had to believe a reliable sample could have been drawn.
It looked like Labour might have been recovering. Populus’s poll this month didn’t show the same sort of recovery in Labour’s support, but it did show the Tory lead falling thanks to them loosing support to the Liberal Democrats. Now two new weekend polls, one from Ipsos MORI for the Sun and one by YouGov for the Sunday Times suggest the Conservative lead is back up into double figures.
MORI’s topline figures, with changes from last month, are CON 42%(nc), LAB 32%(-3), LD 15%(+1). YouGov’s figures are CON 43%(+3), LAB 33%(-2), LDEM 14%(-1) - though that is comparing things to the poll done at Christmastime, comparing it to the previous YouGov poll the Conservatives are unchanged, Labour up 2, the Lib Dems down 2.
We can’t tell exactly what happened - it could have been that ICM’s poll and the Christmas YouGov polls were just blips or artefacts of the seasonal timing, and that actually the picture is pretty stable with the Tory party stable at around 40%, Labour recovering ever so slightly but still in the low thirties, Alternatively it could be that Labour had been recovering, but have been put back in their box thanks to the Hain funding row which has been ticking over during the week - both MORI and YouGov’s fieldwork was done mid-week. It’s now pretty irrelevant, whether there was a recovery or not, these two polls suggest Labour are back down in the low thirties.
On the Lib Dem front, there’s a contrast here between the Populus poll which showed them three points up and the MORI and YouGov polls which show no Clegg boost.
UPDATE: There is also a new ICM poll in the Sunday Telegraph. The topline figures with changes from the December ICM poll are CON 40%(+1), LAB 33%(-1), LDEM 18% (nc), so again the Tories up around 40%, Labour down in the low thirties but recovering slightly (remember the changes here are comparing the poll to the ICM figures that showed a big increase last month - 33% is still an improvement on Labour’s November’s figures) and no obvious boost for the Liberal Democrats.
UPDATE 2: Some more interesting stuff in the polls - the full tables of the YouGov poll are up here, I’ll have a proper look tomorrow.
I don’t regularly report US polls here - there are too many of them and large numbers of dedicated US sites that do it much better than I could, but the New Hampshire primary polls are worth a look: what went wrong?
Since the Iowa caucases all the polls had shown Obama leading Clinton, mostly with large, sometimes double digit leads, yet Clinton ended up winning. It’s only one primary, rather than the election itself, but in the scale of the error it’s comparable to the 1992 polls in the this country.
There are already lots of post-mortem posts going up on US sites with lots of possible explanations. From the professionals there are comments from Nancy Mathiowetz of the AAPOR, John Zogby, Scott Rasmussen, Gary Langer, the head of polling at ABC news and Frank Newport of Gallup, while the best blog analysis comes from Mark Blumenthal on Pollster.com.
Everything seems to be at an early stage at the moment, not least because there is very little data available. US pollsters aren’t compelled to release data tables in the way UK pollsters do, and many offer subscription services and charge people for more detailed information. There are also a lot more pollsters in America, and while those who are members of the AAPOR are supposed to give full details of methodology, not everyone is. I hoped yesterday to go through the tables and compare the make up of the samples with the people who actually voted according to the exit polls, but in most cases the data isn’t there to do so. At the moment therefore these are just early thoughts, no doubt pollsters will release data and have an investigation later.
What can we tell. Firstly, the polls on the Republican primary were pretty good. If you look at Charles Franklin’s graph here on www.pollster.com (second one down), the dots are pretty much on target in the Republican graph (you expect them to all be a bit down and to the left when comparing US polls with actual results because they don’t repercentage to exclude undecided as they do in this country). Given that most polls for the Democrat and Republican race were actually done together (people voting in one primary were added up in one lump, people voting in the other in another lump. The same poll, just presented in two parts) the implication here is that the sampling itself probably wasn’t the problem or the Republican race would also have been wrong.
Secondly there is the interviewer effect in polling on races with a black candidate. There is a long history in the USA of polls in races between a white candidate and a black candidate showing the black candidate doing a lot better than they actually are, theoretically because people are worried that they might come across as racist if they say they are voting against the black candidate. Could this have happened in the the New Hampshire primary? It could have, but the evidence isn’t really there - PEW published a paper last year on the subject that showed yes, there was such a phenomenon in the 1980s and 1990s, but that in more recent contests between white and black candidates in the 2006 mid-term elections there was no such discrepancy. It looks like people are now more relaxed about race and voting. It’s also worth noting that if was this all down to the interviewer effect you might expect automated polls that didn’t use an interviewer to not show the same bias, or at least, to show less of a bias. Rasmussen, who use robocalls with a computer on the end of the line instead of a person were showing great big Obama leads along with everyone else. No, it’s the sort of explanation that poll watchers find fascinating, how people’s answers are biased by various different effects, but in this case I don’t think it is the explanation.
Thirdly, the turnout model. Here we bump into a lack of information to judge the polls on. In the UK likely voters are indentified in a very straightforward manner - pollsters ask respondents if they’ll vote. We don’t always believe them, you can tell ICM that you are 6/10 likely to vote and they’ll metaphorically stroke their chin and stick you in the reject tray, probably quite rightly so, but the methodlogy is very clear. In the the models pollsters use to identify “likely voters” are more complex and often factor in things like past voting habits and so on. In many cases the information on how exactly these calculations are done isn’t easily available so it’s hard to judge, equally a lot of the cross-tabs that would give us a steer on whether they matched the make up of the people the exit polls say actually voted aren’t freely available. In the event the turnout in New Hampshire was higher than expected, particularly amongst older women who backed Clinton - if the pollsters didn’t correctly get the turnout models right, that could be the problem.
Fourthly there is late swing. A lot of people look down on this as a rather poor excuse for getting polls wrong. In my experience most pollsters are pretty scathing about it when a rival uses it to explain why they predicted an election wrongly. That doesn’t mean we can discount such a thing happening - opinion swung rapidly to Obama after the Iowa caucas, in theory it could just have easily have swung sharply away from him.
There is some evidence on this front. The exit polls said 17% of people made up their minds on the day, that’s after the opinion polls had finished. 38% decided in the last three days (including a third of Clinton’s support), when many pollsters stopped work on Monday. In his article John Zogby says he’s used to seeing around 4% to 8% of people claiming they made their minds up on the day, so this does suggest an unusually volatile electorate.He also claims that the last day and a half of his rolling 3 day poll was showing very strong figures for Clinton. Rasmussen too did some late polling into Monday night and saw the trend headed in Clinton’s direction (though obviously not that much; they were still showing a 7 point Obama lead).
Gary Langer rebuts this by pointing out that, if you exclude all the people who decided on the day, the exit polls still show Clinton would have won by 2 points. It wasn’t just those late deciders who voted for Clinton, earlier deciders were for Clinton too. The problem with that logic is that most of the 17% of people who decided on the final day who to vote for weren’t sitting on their hands up until that point. Pollsters were showing around 5-7% undecided, leaving another 10% of people giving a voting intention that they didn’t finally decide upon until the day, in other words, two days earlier that 17% of voters who decided on the day could theoretically have been telling pollsters they were intending to vote for Obama in droves, but later changed their mind and narrowly backed Clinton.
What might have caused a big late swing isn’t really my bag, I’m not a commentator on US politics. There are obvious possibilities in the natural fading of the short term boost Obama would have received from his Iowa victory or the heavy television cover of Hillary Clinton coming close to tears in responding to a question and saying why the contest mattered to her, if a significant weakness to Clinton’s candidacy is her image as an unfeeling, calculating ambition machine, you can imagine how it may have made a difference.
“Late swing” feels like a thorough cop out, so I do hope that in later analysis people find a more concrete explanation somewhere, possibility in the turnout model, at the moment though I think it really could be as mundane as there being a late swing amongst a volatile electorate who saw a sudden glimpse of humanity in a hard-faced candidate.
UPDATE: Danny Finkelstein thinks its the spiral of silence, given that the polls only underestimated Clinton and no one else. The spiral silence is quite possibly contributing to it (Clinton was on the ropes and people were embarrassed to admit to pollsters they were still backing her when they thought everyone else was leaving the sinking ship), but the explanation is too straightforward. The polls had everyone else bang on but Hillary too low? Well, it needs to add to 100% so they must have been somewhere. In fact they were the undecided, remember that US polls do not repercentage polls to exclude don’t knows so these figures included around 5-7% don’t knows. This chimes precisely with the spiral of silence, people claiming they don’t know because they are too embarrassed to say Clinton. It chimes a bit too precisely though…we’d have to accept that all the undecided ended up voting for Clinton…which is stretching credulity a bit too far. Might well be a factor, but not an open and shut case.
UPDATE 2: More comment from Jon Cohen, polling director at the Washington Post, including opinions from Peter Hart who does the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll.
The first poll of the year shows the Conservative gap narrowing, and a boost for the Liberal Democrats under their new leader. The Populus poll has topline figures, with changes from last month, of CON 37%(-3), LAB 33%(+1), LDEM 19%(+3).
We had some contradictory polls last month, some showing the Tory lead narrowing, others showing it growing to record levels. This poll again shows Labour recovering slightly - the one point change is not itself significant, but the context of the ICM and YouGov polls last month that also showed them up, it appears that they have rallied somewhat from the disasters at the end of last year.
More significantly this is the first poll that can really show the Clegg effect - the other polls since he became leader were either done partially before the result, or in the case of the last YouGov poll, has a fieldwork period that hardly instilled confidence. It looks like the change of leadership has given them a long overdue boost, putting them up at 19%, the highest the Lib Dems have recorded in a Populus poll since April (and at the expense of the Conservatives).
A poll showing the Tory lead cut by 4 points should at first sight be a good poll for Brown, yet the Times headlines it “Fresh poll blow for Gordon Brown as David Cameron cements lead”. In one sense it’s a reflection of the media environment Gordon Brown has to operate within these days, a poll shows his party up and his opponent’s lead cut and it’s a “blow”. However, this isn’t going into UKPollingReport’s “crap media reporting of polls” hall of fame - while this poll certainly isn’t good for Cameron, it isn’t particularly good for Brown either, a one point recovery having dropped 5 points last month isn’t something for Labour to celebrate, and certainly isn’t as positive as the ICM and YouGov findings. More importantly, the Times headline refers not to bad news for Labour in the voting intention figures, but to poll findings about Brown himself, which are certainly a blow.
On having what it takes to be a good Prime Minister Brown now trails Cameron by 40% to 44%, where he lead Cameron by 9 points as recently as November. Brown’s reputation for strength, shattered by “chicken Saturday” has not recovered, he leads Cameron by only 6 points when he once dominated him with a 32 point margin.
Looking at the 1-10 scores that Populus ask people to rate party leaders upon, Brown has fallen to an average of 4.6, down from 5.79 in September, the lowest he has yet recorded and lower than nearly ever score that Tony Blair recorded - to put it in context, it’s the sort of figure Michael Howard and Ming Campbell used to record. David Cameron meanwhile was up to 5.07, but first time he’s popped back above the 5.0 mark since January last year. (Clegg is even lower than Brown, but a very large proportion of respondents said don’t know). It looks as though while Labour are rallying slightly, perceptions of Brown himself are still deteriorating.