You can read my commentary on the London mayoral race for Progress magazine here. Alas the publication deadline for the article was before the two polls released this week, so half of what I said is out of date - such is life.
A very full list of candidates for the mayoral election is on the election guide here - though I wouldn’t expect all of them to actually reach the starting line!
Candidates for most of the assembly seats are here, and list candidates announced so far are here.
Finally, I’ve put up a page to keep track of polls for the mayoral election here.
The full tables for the Ipsos MORI for the Labour party are now out.
Asking ALL respondents, the figures were Livingstone 44%, Johnson 33%, Paddick 16%, Berry 4%. Once all but the top two candidates were elminated and second preferences re-allocated the result becomes Livingstone 51%, Johnson 41% (the figures don’t sum to 100% because some people were not reallocated, presumably because they gave second preference votes to candidates that had already been eliminated).
Using MORI’s standard filter on likelihood to vote, which is to take only those 10/10 certain to vote, the figures are LIVINGSTONE 42%, JOHNSON 38%, PADDICK 16%, BERRY 2%. When the second preferences of those certain to vote are reallocated, the final result becomes LIVINGSTONE 48%, JOHNSON 46%.
Interestingly these don’t tally with the figures released by the press yesterday - I think that’s because those figures had not been repercentaged to exclude don’t knows and won’t votes.
As I said this morning the poll is already a fortnight old and was conducted prior to Lee Jasper’s suspension and the negative publicity that brought Ken Livingstone (though I suspect the contrast with the more recent YouGov poll that showed Boris ahead on first preferences is more to do with methodology than a shift in support). Either way, with only 2% between them on the second count, the race appears to be very, very close.
(For all polls on the London mayoral election go here)
After waiting months for a proper poll on the London mayoral election, two come along at once (I’ve resisted a bendy bus metaphor!). Firstly there is a new YouGov poll for London Tonight, and unlike the January YouGov poll with the sorry sample of under 400, this one has a respectable sample size of 1,000.
The topline figures, with changes from the last decent sized YouGov poll back in December, are JOHNSON 44%(-1), LIVINGSTONE 39%(-5), PADDICK 12%(+5).
While that’s good news for Boris, Ken Livingstone has hit back by releasing some of the Labour party’s private polling for the campaign by Ipsos MORI. Their polling has topline figures of Ken 37%, Boris 28%, Brian Paddick 14% and Sian Berry 3% taking all those expressing a preference and using only those certain to vote - the filter MORI use for their standing voting intention questions - LIVINGSTONE 38%, JOHNSON 35%, PADDICK 14%. Asked to pick just between Boris and Ken, Livingstone leads by 2 points. Corrected figures for this poll are now here.
Neither of these seem to have been officially released yet, so no news on fieldwork dates and so on.
UPDATE: On Livingstone’s website he is busy dismissing ICM’s recent survey for Porsche on the congestion charge by - with quite unbelievable chutzpah - referring to TfL’s “mystery poll”. Here’s the difference, whatever the sample size of the ICM poll, the full question order and wording are visible for all to see and judge if the questions are fair and just…
UPDATE 2: The YouGov poll was conducted between the 19th and 21st February. No news of when the MORI poll was done - they are working out exactly what data has entered the public domain before releasing the relevant tables.
UPDATE 3: And the MORI fieldwork was done between the 8th-12th of February, so about a week and a half earlier. In between the two polls Lee Jasper was suspended by Ken Livingstone, which did result in some negative publicity and could have damaged his ratings - though it is equally as likely that the difference between the two polls is down to the very different methodologies used, or simple random variation between different samples.
ComRes’s monthly poll has topline voting intention figures, with changes from their January poll, of CON 41%(+3), LAB 30%(nc), LDEM 17%(nc). The poll was taken between February 22nd and February 24th and the full tables are available here.
ComRes tend to produce the strongest figures for the Conservative party, largely because their weighting is more favourable to them than that of ICM and Populus (equally, they tend to give the poorest figures to Labour), but it remains a substantial lead and the direction of the trend doesn’t support that intriguing YouGov/Economist poll that hinted at Northern Rock’s nationalisation having helped Labour.
UPDATE: The morning after and I’ve had chance to look at the detailed tables. This month ComRes’s weighting isn’t actually unduly favourable to the Conservatives - the target weighting figures that ComRes use are based on a rolling average of only 4 polls, compared to 10 for Populus and 20 for ICM. This means ComRes’s weighting is far more volatile, and this month they are actually weighting past Conservative support to exactly the same level as ICM did in their last poll. Some of the difference between the companies’ figures may still be down to methodology, likelihood of voting, the spiral of silence adjustment, ComRes’s “squeeze question” or Lib Dem weighting, which is different…. but it’s not as simple this month as ComRes weighting the Tories more highly.
Today sees the first polls taken since the nationalisation of Northern Rock. A snap Populus poll with a small sample size for the Times found that 49% of people agreed that it was right for the government to nationalise Northern Rock, with 40% disagreeing -although 69% thought they should have tried harder to find a private buyer. 58% of people said the government was to blame for the problems affecting Northern Rock to some extent, but this was lower than the proportion of people who blamed the credit crunch, the city authorities or the management of Northern Rock itself.
The poll appears to show Brown and Darling back ahead of Cameron and Osborne on economic trust, though it’s worth noting that the poll doesn’t appear to have been politically weighted. Answers to questions like that are often extremely party partisan, so this shift will be largely to do with weighting, rather than a change in public opinion.
While there is support for nationalisation, it doesn’t mean that Labour’s handling of the issue is a positive for them, it may simply be a recognition that it is only practical opinion at this stage, the public could still think the overall way the problem was handled is poor. A second poll, this time by YouGov for the Economist, found only 11% thought the government’s handling of Northern Rock over the last few months was excellent or good, 51% think it has been poor or awful.
Does this benefit the Conservatives? In the short term at least, not at all: if anything, their reaction appears to have backfired on them. 59% of people agreed the Conservatives would have done much the same and they are just playing politics. That may reflect no more than a low opinion of all politicans rather than the Conservatives specifically, but the proof of the pudding is in the voting intentions - and the figures for the Economist show a marginal shift from the Conservatives to Labour in the wake of the nationalisation - the topline figures with changes from the last YouGov poll were CON 40%(-1), LAB 34%(+2), LDEM 16%(nc). As ever, we shouldn’t read too much into small changes in a single poll, but it looks like this hasn’t damaged Labour.
ICM’s monthly poll for the Guardian has topline figures of CON 37%, LAB 34%, LDEM 21%. The changes from the last ICM poll are Labour up 2, with the other two parties unchanged. The poll was conducted between the 15th and 17th of February.
The poll continues the pattern we’ve seen since September last year of Labour doing comparatively better compared to the Conservatives in ICM polls done for the Guardian than in polls done for other clients. As I said when I first commented on this apparent pattern, I can find no obvious explanation for it, but as the months go past the patten seems to be consistent. The shift in voting intention from the last ICM/Guardian poll, which may be the better comparison, is Labour down 1 and the Lib Dems up 1.
The rest of the poll concentrated on attitudes towards taxataion. Forced to chose between tax cuts and reduced services or sustained spending, 51% said they would chose sustained spending with 36% backing tax cuts. What to make of this question depends largely on the wording - it is implied in the Guardian’s coverage that people were presented with the choice of existing spending or tax cuts even if it meant cuts in spending for services like the NHS. In practice no party will ever go into an election promising tax cuts at the expense of the NHS: parties promising tax reductions will present them as being funded in more acceptable ways, while judging from past election campaigns their opponents will try to paint any promised cuts as being funding out of whatever public spending is most popular. How popular tax cuts actually are will depend upon which of these various claims the public actually believe.
Last week Mike Smithson broke the story of a BPC investigation into an Ipsos MORI poll carried out for Ken Livingstone. In the Evening Standard today Andrew Gilligan picks up Mike’s story and has got some comment from John Curtice and Ben Page of MORI.
The story begins back in December with this press release from the Mayor’s office, claiming to show that a poll for Transport for London showed two thirds of respondents were in favour of the new emmissions based congestion charge.
There is no info on when the poll was conducted or what the questions were, but normally pollsters are obliged to release this along with the full tables for polls that are released to the media, either by publishing the tables on their websites, or upon request. MORI however have refused to release the tables for this survey. In the Standard Ben Page explained that they asked TfL for permission, but it had been refused. In response the British Polling Council - the association of polling companies who have agreed to abide by its disclosure and openness rules - has set up in an investigative sub-committee consisting of Peter Kellner, Peter Riddell and John Curtice to look into the case.
So what are TfL hiding? And what are the rules?
At the simplest level, it could be as simple as some of the questions showing a lack of support for Ken’s policies, or even TfL just not wanting to release the data, as is their right. There doesn’t have to be anything dodgy at all here.
Mike Smithson says his understanding is that there were some additional political questions in the poll that shouldn’t have been asked in a taxpayer funded poll. Gilligan cites some anonymous sources agreeing with this, but it is flat out denied by the Mayor’s office - who would say that, wouldn’t they? - and more convincingly by Ben Page who states “There is nothing in those surveys about the elections, or Boris. We have not been paid by the Mayor to ask voting intention questions”. (UPDATE - Mike Smithson makes an important correction to the quote from him in the comments here)
On top of that, I don’t think the BPC disclosure rules would compel MORI to release those questions anyway. The disclosure rules state that if a privately commissioned poll is made public they have to disclose the tables, question wording and so on for the published questions but they can keep private other unpublished findings as long as they don’t contradict or affect the published answers. So in theory a client could easily ask lots of transport questions and lots of political questions, release the first lot and be entirely within their rights to keep the second lot secret.
The other possiblity cited in the Standard is that someone was playing fast and loose with either the interpretation of the results, or with the wording of the original question. This at least would make sense, the wording of the questions hasn’t been announced and if the tables and wording were revealed in full any slight-of-hand would become apparent. The Mayor of London has some previous here - check out reports of this April 2005 poll for the Mayor of London’s free newspaper the Londoner - this time by ICM, which apparently showed 79% support for the Olympics. The questions itself is fine, but if you look at the full survey, you’ll see if was asked straight after a truly shameless question asking if people agreed with Nelson Mandela that London was the best place to hold the Olympics.
The rules of the BPC are intended to promote openness. While membership is open only to companies conducting proper representative polls, there’s no policing of what the right methods of sampling, weighting and so on are. It’s primary purpose is to ensure full disclosure of tables and methodologies so that people can see any sharp practice for themselves - if you see figures from ICM, Populus, YouGov, ComRes or other members reported in the newspapers you can find out whether the questions are biased or the question order dodgy by looking at the raw questions and tables yourself. It acts as a strong incentive for the member companies not to allow clients to get away with such practices because they know they know it would be clear for everyone to see and it would be their reputation that was damaged. It lets us trust the polls because, even if we ourselves don’t examine the tables to look for sharp practice, the fact they are available means that someone else somewhere will, and would pick up any misbehaviour. It is a wholly good and admirable endeavour.
Ipsos MORI’s Ben Page explains their position on this poll in the Standard: “Our position is that ongoing satisfaction surveys and policy surveys of the kind we do for TfL do not constitute a poll and are not covered by the BPC rules. We believe they are covered by the rules of the Market Research Society, which do not require us to publish immediate data breakdowns”. The rules of the BPC refer to “All data and research findings made on the basis of surveys conducted by member organisations that enter the public domain” and that this also applies to any privately commissioned polls that enter the public arena. Obviously it will be down to Peter, Peter and John to look into the details of the case, Ipsos MORI’s full explanation and make a decision on how the actual rules apply in this case. Personally though, whether or not this does fall within the current rules, my opinion is that if there is just one instance when it is overwhelmingly desirable that the rules should apply, it is when polls are commissioned and used by a political figure to support his position in the policy debate.
Once upon a time Bob Worcester told Robert Maxwell where to stick it when the Mirror’s owner wanted to decide whether or not the results of the polls he commissioned were ever released…
As usual the Sunday Times commissioned questions on a wide range of subjects, so here are some of the other findings from the weekend poll.
The Beijing Olympics. 49% of people said they would support a boycott of the Olympics by British athletes in response to China’s policy in Darfur and their past record.
Rowan Williams. The story seems to have blown over now, and there were no polls on the issue at the time. The YouGov poll found that 67% of respondents thought the Archbishop had damaged his authority through his comments. People were eqaully split on whether he should stand down as Archbishop of Cantabury, with 40% agreeing and 40% disagreeing.
National identity. Asked to chose just one word to describe themselves, 42% of people chose British, 54% chose one of the constituent nationalities. The YouGov tables don’t offer a single break for England, but in the English breaks people identifying primarily as English and people identifying primarily as British are pretty evenly matched. In Scotland 68% of people identified themselves primarily as Scottish, with only 22% saying British.
Phone tappling. YouGov gave respondents a list of scenarios and asked whether it would be appropriate for the authorities to tap telephones under those circumstances. Large majorities were opposed to the authorities bugging people organising peaceful demostrations against the government or trade unionists planning a strike (though even in those circumstances 9% and 8% of people respectively thought bugging would be OK with just the permission of a senior police officer). Only 34% objected to the bugging of people planning illegal (but non-violent) protests. For people suspected of more serious offences there was overwhelming support for the principle of bugging - 88% thought it fine to bug suspected drug dealers, 91% suspected terrorists. In both cases a majority thought only the permission of a senior police officer should be necessary.
There was, however, some support for the idea that conversations with lawyers or MPs should be sacrosanct. 28% thought suspected drug dealers conversations with lawyers should not be monitored. 22% thought suspected terrorists conversations with their lawyers shouldn’t be moderated. For conversations with MPs the figures were 23% and 18%.
After almost a fortnight without any voting intention polls there is a new poll from YouGov in the Sunday Times. The topline voting intention figures, with changes from YouGov’s last poll back in January, are CON 41%(nc), LAB 32%(-1), LDEM 16%(nc). The poll was conducted between the 14th and 15th of February and clearly shows no significant change in party support over the past two weeks.
The Sunday Times often commission questions on a wide grab bag of issues, so I expect I’ll be posting again tomorrow on other bits and bobs in the poll, but the Sunday Times are highlighting the economic questions. They found David Cameron and George Osborne have a 6 point lead over Labour on who people would most trust to run the economy. There’s a lot of different ways of asking which party people trust most on the economy, and no doubt they produce different figures, but I think this is the largest lead the Conservatives have managed to pull out in one of them under David Cameron. Answers to economic optimism questions remained grim - 50% expected their household finances to get worse in the next, with only 12% expecting them to get better.
44% of respondents wanted to see Alistair Darling removed as Chancellor, with only 27% thinking he should stay in the job. Those answers will probably be largely partisan - but with only 27% backing him I expect even a fair proportion of Labour supporters want him out.
The Sunday Times normally put the full tables of their YouGov polls up on their website, so check there later for more details.
A sudden outbreak of voodoo polling this morning, or more to the point a sudden outbreak of serious newspapers reporting a voodoo poll as being meaningful.
What’s a voodoo poll? It’s what Bob Worcester calls the little “press the red button to vote” polls on Sky News, or the little readers’ votes things on the BBC website. They are entertaining enough, but they mean nothing whatsoever, they don’t measure the opinion of a representative group of people, they only measure the opinions of people who wander past that particular website (or are directed to said website by people trying to influence the poll) and care enough about the issue to vote…often several times if they know how to delete cookies from their computer. The classic voodoo polls were the old Today programme man of the year things, which used to have flagrant, mass vote rigging to try and get John Major or Tony Blair as the man of the year.
We all know that they don’t mean anything and certainly shouldn’t be reported as representing public opinion, and yet…The Times this morning reports that “A poll by the Berwick Advertiser showed 79 per cent in favour of switching allegiance from Westminster to Holyrood”, the Telegraph claims “the results of a poll have suggested that 80 per cent of the residents agree”,The Scotsman tells us that “an online poll has suggested 80 per cent of residents are backing the suggestion”,the BBC reveals “a poll carried out by the local newspaper revealed 79% of people in the area backed reunification with Scotland.”
The poll in question? It’s on the sidebar of the Berwick Advertiser’s website here, you can vote in it now if you want. Doesn’t matter if you live in Berwick, or indeed the UK. It’s a classic voodoo poll, so no attempt to limit it to the proper universe of people, nothing to stop it being fixed, no attempt at producing a demographically representative sample. These things really shouldn’t be published by reputable newspapers as an indication of public opinion - or at least - not without heavy caveats about them being non-representative, self-selecting polls.