ComRes’s monthly poll for the Independent has topline voting intentions with changes from last month of CON 38%(-3), LAB 31%(+1), LDEM 17%(nc). Unlike ICM and YouGov’s polls since the budget, there is no obvious Conservative leap here, in fact, their lead over Labour has narrowed and they are back under 40%. The poll was conducted between the 28th and 30th of March.
This is not, necessarily, a change in public opinion though. Long time readers will remember that we used to coment on ComRes’s lack of political weighting. Well, they do now weight by past vote and have done for several months, but the way they do it seems very strange since their target weights change significantly from month to month. ComRes aren’t unusually pro-Labour, which was one result of not weighting politically, but they haven’t seemed to have made their samples much less volatile, which is normally seen as the benefit of political weighting.
In last months’ poll that showed an 11 point Tory lead, 19% of the total sample (including non-voters) said they had voted Conservative back in 2005. This month, only 17% of the sample said they voted Conservative back in 2005 - so, the Tories are down, but it’s a less Tory sample.
When politicians are asked about unflattering polling figures it’s a tricky question to answer - what can you say? “The poll shows no one likes me and I’m going to lose”? Most politicans resort to the time honoured cliches of there being lots to play for or “the only poll that counts is on polling day”. The latter grates on my nerves, but I can see that there’s not much good you can say.
An alternative of course, is to shoot the messenger and try and claim that the poll is all wrong and really you are in front. That’s when Ken Livingstone has tried to do today… not, it has to be said, very successfully. Let’s see what he said:
1) YouGov’s data does not accurately weight the proportion of black and Asian people in London […] Yougov’s Internet panels therefore do not accurately reflect London’s population, most notably significantly under-counting ethnic minority Londoners It’s true YouGov don’t weight by ethnicity: no pollsters do in normal political polls. There is no particular reason why they shouldn’t, in fact, it tends to have a good correlation with voting intention and individuals don’t change their ethnicity over time, so it would be quite a good weighting variable - but no one does it. What is bizarre is where on earth Livingstone got the idea that the YouGov sample didn’t include enough ethnic minority voters, just because you don’t specifically weight by a variable, unless there is a bias in your sample it doesn’t follow it will be unrepresentative - in fact, polling is based on the assumption that if a sample is representative in terms of age, gender, class, etc, etc, it will be representative in other ways, like who people would vote for or what they think about policies.
There are no published figures for the ethnic make up of the sample, so there is no way it can be known and nothing for Livingstone to base his criticism on. It looks from this Guardian report that they’ve got the strange idea that YouGov’s sample included the same proportion of ethnic minorities as in the rest of the UK. This is just rubbish, why would it? In the last YouGov poll of London around 24% of respondents were from ethnic minorities. That probably isn’t high enough - the proportion of ethnic minorities in London between the ages of 18 and 65 is around 29%, so even once you add in all those white pensioners it’s still going to be slightly higher than 24%…but really not very different. So first criticism: FALSE, there is no reason to think YouGov underestimate white Londoners by a signficiant degree.
2) “YouGov has a record of significantly underestimating Ken Livingstone’s vote in London. On the day before the last Mayoral election YouGov put put Ken Livingstone just two per cent ahead of the Conservative […] even though Livingstone actually won by nearly 11 percent. We’ve had this wheeled out before, and it’s still false. In 2004 YouGov published two sets of figures, one was based on only those likely to vote, and overestimated Steve Norris’s support. However, the figures in today’s poll are NOT based on only those certain to vote, they are based on ALL respondents. YouGov’s 2004 figures conducted on this basis predicted that Livingstone would win by 55% to Norris’s 45%. The actual result was Livingstone 55% to Norris 45%, so YouGov got it exacly right. So, second criticism: FALSE, YouGov’s final comparable poll in 2004 got the result correct.
3) YouGov today claims to find that Ken Livingstone will get no more votes for Mayor than Labour will win in the London Assembly elections - both will get 37 per cent. In the 2004 election, Ken Livingstone polled 11% higher than the Labour Party in the Assembly elections and all other polling, plus the Labour Party’s canvass returns, has shown Ken polling significantly ahead of Labour for the London Assembly. Labour’s canvass returns are, of course, not available for us to use as evidence and there have been no other published polls that asked about voting intention in the London assembly. While Ken Livingstone did indeed poll above the Labour party in 2004, there is no particular reason to think this is automatic. Peter Kellner’s explanation, that it shows exactly what it appears to: Ken used to be more popular than Labour but isn’t anymore, seems perfectly feasible. Third criticism: FALSE, there is no other publically available contemporary data on voting intention in the London Assembly to compare this too, and no reason to think it wrong
4) Today’s YouGov polling on issues reveals results far out of line with normal telephone polling. Normal telephone polling carried out by IPSOS MORI only two weeks ago found Londoners supporting the £25 a day CO2 charge on gas guzzlers by more than two to one at 61% per cent to 27%, whereas YouGov reports that this lead is only 41% to 39%. The two questions here weren’t comparable. YouGov asked a single question about supporting “increasing the congestion charge to £25 a day for higher polluting cars”. The MORI poll referred to is presumably this one, in which people had previously been given a list of examples of cars that would be affected by the £25 charge and had been told about the 100% discount for cars producing the lowest emissions, which YouGov didn’t mention. That’s not to say there is anything wrong with MORI’s poll, just that when people were given more information about the policy and the discount that’s included they are more positive about it. So, fourth criticism: FALSE, the questions weren’t comparable.
5) Today’s poll shows minority parties (that is all parties other than the three main ones) receiving only 5% of the vote […] This is totally implausible . On this criticism I have some sympathy, in fact, I’ve been saying similar things in response to earlier mayoral polls. At the last election others got 18%. A lot of that was probably due to the European elections being on the same day and UKIP’s resultant strong showing…but even then, UKIP only got 6% so the 5% still seems very low. It may be because they’ve had minimal media coverage and minor parties may creep up in the polls once the mayoral manifestos are sent out and people become aware of them, it may be because YouGov prompting only by the big three parties is producing an artificially low level of support. As a caveat though, we thought the same thing prior to the Scottish elections and Peter Kellner even altered the prompting in YouGov’s questions to be more friendly to minor parties… the end result was to over-estimate them. It turned out that the collapse in minor party support was genuine and it might be here too. So, fifth criticism: FAIR POINT, but it’s not just YouGov, Ipsos MORI too had the others on only 4%
Interestingly enough there is another legitimate criticism that Livingstone missed - the poll was done over the Easter weekend. It made not have been such a problem this year since many school holidays weren’t actually at Easter, and the weather was so hideous most people were probably cowering at home, but traditionally long bank holiday weekends produce strange polling results because of people being on holiday, out with their families, visiting relatives and so on.
In situations like this I do always hope that politicians who poo-poo polls they don’t like don’t really believe what they are saying. Polls do set the agenda, so it is perfectly rational for politicians to try and disparage polls that put them in a bad light (though obviously, as a supporter of better public understanding of polls, I do hope the public see through any such pathetic, base claims and run the culprits from office with flaming torches), but if they actually believe such things in the privacy of their campaign headquarters and dismiss any unwanted messages as flawed they are in deep trouble.
Not confimed yet, but apparently a new YouGov poll for the Standard has topline voting intentions, with changes from their last poll, of JOHNSON 47% (-2), LIVINGSTONE 37% (nc), PADDICK 10% (-2), Others 5%. With no candidate getting over 50% support, the second preferences of other candidates would come into play. This poll shows second prefrences splitting in favour of Boris Johnson, so if repeated at the election in May there is no doubt Boris Johnson would be the next mayor. The poll was conducted between the 20th and 25th March.
As with the national YouGov poll last week these figures confirm a trend. When the YouGov poll at the start of the month showed a 12 point lead for Boris Johnson it could possibly have turned out to be a rogue. With a second poll showing the same magnitude of lead, and nothing to contradict it, we can be pretty confident that Boris Johnson has a substantial lead and, barring ‘events’, looks headed for a victory in May.
Past London Mayor polls are here, lists of candidates for mayor and the assembly are here.
The YouGov poll in the Telegraph is now up here and the full tables are on the YouGov website here. The full voting intentions are CON 43%(nc), LAB 29%(+2), LDEM 17%(+1).
The other standard trackers all paint an equally bleak picture for the government, on the forced choice question (which I always tend to think of our best indicator of which way tactical voting is likely to go next time round, given that there are no regular tracker questions that ask directly about it) the Conservatives now enjoy a 12 point lead over Labour, they have an 8 point lead as the party most likely to run the economy well, David Cameron has an 8 point lead as Best Prime Minister. Gordon Brown’s net satisfaction rating is at minus 40, Alistair Darling’s at minus 42.
The poll is unremittingly awful news for the government on every level. I initially thought it showed that people were not blaming the government for the economic problems facing the country (consciously at least, I have no doubt that the ‘feel bad factor’ is damaging support anyway). Looking at the detailed tables though even that isn’t true.
The figures in the Telegraph suggest only 22% of people blame Brown’s past and 8% blame his present policies for the present economic problems, with 52% blaming it on the worldwide credit crunch. Looked at alone those suggest people aren’t blaming Brown… except that on the detailed tables we see that YouGov then asked people what the second biggest reason was - and found and additional 16% of people blamed Brown’s past policies and 22% blamed his present ones. In a separate question only 22% said they thought the government seemed to be handling the situation properly, 59% said it wasn’t.
Perhaps the only slivers of comfort Labour supporters can gather from the poll is that that there is still not huge enthusiasm for the Tories. 22% of people say they would be delighted if David Cameron formed the next government, 33% wouldn’t mind and 32% would be appalling. The Tories do seem to be ahead by default, not because people are excited by them, but because they think they would do a better job than a government the large majority (64% to 21%) are disatisfied with: this poll shows 38% think David Cameron and the Conservatives would do a better job, with only 24% thinking they’d do worse.
A fortnight ago, shortly after the budget, YouGov produced a poll showing a startling 16 point Tory lead, which at first glance looked like an obvious rogue. A couple of days later though an ICM poll showed a 13 point lead, suggesting that the double-point Tory lead was genuine and the budget had somehow led to a dramatic shift in party support.
The question following that was whether there really had been a sea-change in public opinion, or whether it was just a very term reaction to negative economic news and we’d get back to more run of the mill voting intention figures in the next round of polls. Since then we’ve had the Easter holidays, which pretty much precluded any polling. In tomorrow’s Telegraph though we’ve got the first poll since Easter, YouGov’s monthly monitor, and it suggests the Conservatives are maintaining that election winning lead.
The topline voting intention figures, with changes from a fortnight ago, are CON 43%(nc), LAB 29%(+2), no sign of the Lib Dem figure yet on the Telegraph website. Labour are slightly higher than a fortnight ago, but the real significance is to confirm that the jump in the Tory lead was more than just a flash in the pan.
Full report tomorrow when I’ve seen the details of the poll.
We are still in the period when no one really should be publishing any polls, since the fieldwork would have had to have been done over the Easter weekend. Here’s some things to keep you amused.
Firstly, over at the Election Guide part of the site I have - by popular demand - added the Northern Ireland seats. The boundary review in Northern Ireland makes very little difference to the overall picture, but for those who want to discuss seats in Northern Ireland the pages are here. As ever, I should recommend Nicholas Whyte’s site here, which has all the information on Northern Irish psephology you could possibly want and was a great help.
Secondly, there is rarely any polling done at all for local authority elections, except occassionally for the London borough elections when there is a nice geographical area where you know everyone has local elections at the same time. If you are hoping for polls on the May 2008 local elections you are probably going to be disappointed (apart, of course, from the London mayoral elections). What we do normally get are predictions from Rallings and Thrasher based on local authority by-elections, and some of their first predictions for the local elections have been published in the Local Government Chronicle, reproduced on LabourHome here.
Finally, for those of you pondering when we will get a proper poll, if everything goes according to normal timetables the monthly YouGov poll for the Telegraph should appear tonight or tomorrow. This should be an interesting poll - the last YouGov poll showed a 16 point Tory lead, a result that appeared to be an obvious rogue until ICM produced a 13 point Tory lead a few days later. The monthly YouGov/Telegraph poll will be our first chance to see if those huge Tory leads were the beginning of some sort of sea-change in British politics, or just a short-term negative reaction to the budget.
We shouldn’t expect many political polls in the next few days given the Easter break (and if we do, we should probably be wary of them for the same reason) In the meantime here’s an Ipsos MORI poll on class. The poll found 52% of respondents considered themselves working class and 44% middle class.
Polls are of course weighted to represent the correct class breakdown of the country, but these breaks - based on occupation - bare little resemblence to how people classify themselves. Amongst the AB socially classification (that’s professionals like teachers, doctors, businessmen, managers and so on) 68% see themselves as middle class, 30% working class. At the opposite end of the scale, the DE social classification (that is, casual workers, the unemployed and long term sick, labourers, semi-skilled manual workers, etc) 66% see themselves as working class but 28% see themselves as middle class. It may mean people have strange ideas of what class they are, or it may just mean the ABC1C2DE classification of social grade by occupation isn’t actually very good.
More fun are the questions further on about what political parties and activities people associate with different classes. Perceptions of political parties representing different social classes are still present to a degree - 39% of people think the Labour party best represent the working class (compared to 10% who think the Tories do and 8% who think the Lib Dems do). 46% of people think the Conservatives best represent the middle cass (compared to 19% who think Labour do and 7% who think the Lib Dems do). 65% think the Tories best represent the upper classes.
Taking the bus is the activity most associated with being working class (by 62%), followed by having an allotment (52%, down significantly from 72% when a similar question was asked in 1991), eating in front of the telly (48%), watching Coronation Street (45%), going to football matches (42%), and eating peas with a knife (35%). Buying organic food was the activity most associated with being middle class (52%), along with going to museums (46%), playing cricket (41%) or rugby (39%). Going to the opera (61%) was associated with the upper classes.
Shopping at Lidl, Somerfield, Iceland, Morrisons or Asda was seen as working class, Tescos as relatively classless, Sainsburys as Middle class and Waitrose as either middle or upper class.
One I missed: a week or so ago there was a MRUK Cello poll in the Sunday Times on Scottish voting intentions. For the Westminster Parliament support stood at CON 18%, LAB 34%, LDEM 11%, SNP 34%. For Holyrood, the constituency vote was CON 15%, LAB 31%, LDEM 12%, SNP 39% and regional vote CON 13%, LAB 30%, LDEM 11%, SNP 40%.
On his blog Iain Dale has a presentation from a Lib Dem conference last spring that included some polling on attitudes towards coalitions. As the third party the media don’t often commission interesting polling stuff about the Lib Dems, so it’s nice to have some. Sadly he only has the presentation from a discussion session about hung Parliaments, and not the polling update from Chris Rennard that was promised for the following morning, but there goes!
The presentation includes the results of questions about the effect knowing or thinking (it’s sadly not made clear exactly what the question wording was) that the Lib Dems would form a coalition with David Cameron and the Conservatives or Gordon Brown and Labour would have on people’s likelihood to vote Lib Dem. In both cases just under 4/10 people said it would make no difference.
Overall the figures were not hugely different. 29% of people would be more likely to vote Lib Dem if they were going into coalition with the Tories, 31% less likely. 30% more likely if they were headed into coalition with Labour, 25% less likely.
Broken down by party, unsurprisingly if the Lib Dems allied themselves with Labour Conservative supporters would be drastically less likely to support them - 61% would be less likely, including 38% who would be “much less likely”. There is a mirror image for Labour supporters - 59% of whom would be less likely if the Lib Dems allied themselves with the Tories. No surprises there, though it underlines the importance for the Lib Dems of maintaining a neutral stance, there are plenty of supporters of both other parties who vote tactically for the Lib Dems to keep the other one out, and they can’t afford to alienate half of them.
More interestingly, amongst current Lib Dem supporters attitudes are far more positive towards a Brown alliance than a Cameron one. 34% of current Lib Dem supporters would be more likely to vote for the party if they allied themselves with Brown, with 24% against. Only 23% were more likely to vote for the party if they allied themselves with Cameron, while 34% were against.
An important caveat is that the polling is a year out of date now, so public attitudes towards David Cameron and Gordon Brown have probably changed. The Lib Dem presentation goes on to make the sound point that even if there is a hung Parliament, the decision will probably be made by the Parliamentary arithmatic, but - back in Spring 2007 at least - it looks as though Lib Dem supporters would have been much happier to see their party supporting a Brown government rather than a Cameron one.
While the 16 point Tory lead on Sunday provided big headlines and no doubt cheered up Conservatives across the country, I suspect even the most rabid Tory suspected in their heart that it was probably an outlier and that the lead would return to more normal levels in the next YouGov poll. The latest ICM poll however suggests there may indeed have been some sort of shift in public opinion.
The monthly ICM poll for the Guardian has topline voting intention figures, with changes from their poll conducted last week, of CON 42%(+2), LAB 29%(-2), LDEM 21%(+1). The poll was conducted between the 14th and 16th, so would have included David Cameron’s speech to the Tory spring conference.
The Conservative lead of 13 points is the largest I can find looking back at ICM polls since 1987. While it’s smaller than the 16 point lead the Tories enjoyed with YouGov at the weekend, this seems to be a pattern between ICM and YouGov recently - the higher levels of Lib Dem support reported by ICM are at the expense of the Tories. Whichever pollster is correct, they seem to be interpreting the same underlying position.
Asked about who they trust more with the economy, ICM found an 8 point lead for the Conservatives, 40% to 32%.
It appears that, for whatever reason, the budget has heralded a fall in confidence in Labour’s economic management and a decisive switch towards the Conservatives. While we’ve got a couple of polls confirming it, what we can’t tell is whether it will last at all. If it does we are in a new game - it’s the sort of lead where David Cameron is going to stop facing questions about why he isn’t doing better, and is instead going to end up facing more criticism from his own troops about why he isn’t being bolder. Labour would start facing assumptions of their defeat in the media and itchy backbenchers with the minds focused by possible unemployment.
UPDATE: Tables now up on ICM’s website here. The difference between the lead here and the lead in YouGov’s poll was actually mostly down to ICM’s topline adjustment for the “spiral of silence” - the theory that some people who say don’t know are actually supporters of an unpopular party who are too bashful to admit it to the interviewer. While people still refer to this an as adjustment to make up for “shy Tories”, for the past five years at least it’s normally favoured “shy Labourites”. This month ICM’s unadjusted figures would have been CON 43%, LAB 28%, LDEM 21%.