Labour leadership

Regular polling remains sparse given the ongoing inquiry and that we’re in that odd sort of political interregnum with Labour yet to elect their new leaders, but there have been a couple of polls on the Labour contest and the EU. A new ORB poll on the Labour leadership earlier in the week showed Andy Burnham was seen as the candidate most likely to help Labour’s chances at the next election (36%), followed by Liz Kendall on 25%. Full tabs are here.

I would be extremely cautious of polling about the Labour leadership election. Essentially there are two real questions about the Labour leadership – who is going to win, and who would be best at winning votes for Labour. For the first one, we need a poll of Labour party members, and we don’t have a recent one (there is some data from a YouGov poll of party members for Tim Bale & Paul Webb, but that was done straight after the election before the candidates were clear). For the second, I suspect any data is fatally flawed by the public’s low awareness of the candidates – right now, polls about the Labour leadership are little more than name recognition contests. Looking at the tables for the ORB poll it looks to me as if the main reason the prospective leaders scored so highly is that the question didn’t offer a don’t know option, if it had, I bet the don’t knows would have had a runaway victory.

Worth looking at as a corrective is this ICM poll on the Labour leadership that asked people to identify photos of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and Jeremy Corbyn. 23% were able to identify Burnham, 17% Cooper, 10% Kendall and 9% Corbyn. Essentially, if 90% of the respondents to a poll can’t even recognise a photo of Liz Kendall or Jeremy Corbyn, how good a judge are they going to be on what sort of Labour leader they’d be? “I’m a particular fan of the one I’ve never heard of and know nothing at all about” said no one, ever.

Sky poll on the EU

SkyNews have released a poll they have carried out themselves amongst a panel of BSkyB subscribers. The poll itself shows nothing particularly new (people think the EU is good for the British economy by 39% to 31%, etc, etc), but the concept itself is interesting – it’s a proper effort to get a representative sample from their subscriber database, weighted by age, gender, past vote, Experian segment (as an alternative to class), ethnicity, tenure and so on. It is, however, unavoidably only made up of Sky subscribers, which will bring with it its own biases. The question is to what extent those biases can be cancelled by their weighting and sampling. We shall see. The tables for this first poll are here.

Parliamentary debates

Last week there were two Parliamentary debates on regulating opinion polls. The first, last Thursday, was prompted by Lord Lipsey and concerned whether polling companies needed regulating to prevent them asking leading and biased questions – though it was largely made up of the specifics of one single poll on mitochondrial donation. The other was the second reading of George Foulkes private members bill regulating opinion polls, which includes a good response from Andrew Cooper of Populus. Lord Bridges for the government stated they had no plans to regulate polls. Lord Foulkes’s bill was nodded through to the committee stage, so will trundle on for a little longer.

Herding pollsters

Finally there’s a great piece by Matt Singh on pollster herding here. Matt mentions some of the possible reasons for herding, but more importantly actually does the sums on whether there was any herding… and finds there wasn’t. The spread between different pollsters in the final polls was very much in line with what you’d expect to find.

A brief summary of this week’s polls before I have some downtime:

YouGov/Sun (17/4) – CON 34%, LAB 34%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 14%, GRN 5%
Opinium/Observer (17/4) – CON 36%, LAB 32%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%, GRN 5%
YouGov/S Times (18/4) – CON 33%, LAB 36%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%, GRN 5%
YouGov/Sun (19/4) – CON 34%, LAB 35%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%, GRN 5%
Ashcroft (19/4) – CON 34%, LAB 30%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 13%, GRN 4%
Populus (19/4) – CON 32%, LAB 34%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 15%, GRN 4%
ICM/Guardian (19/4) – CON 34%, LAB 32%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 11%, GRN 5%
TNS (20/4) – CON 32%, LAB 34%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 15%, GRN 5%
YouGov/Sun (20/4) – CON 34%, LAB 35%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 13%, GRN 5%
YouGov/Sun (21/4) – CON 35%, LAB 34%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 13%, GRN 5%
YouGov/Sun (22/4) – CON 33%, LAB 34%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 14%, GRN 5%
ComRes/ITV/Mail (22/4) – CON 36%, LAB 32%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 10%, GRN 5%
Populus (23/4) – CON 32%, LAB 35%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 14%, GRN 5%
YouGov/Sun (23/4) – CON 33%, LAB 35%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%, GRN 6%
Panelbase (23/4) – CON 31%, LAB 34%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 17%, GRN 4%
Survation/Mirror (23/4) – CON 33%, LAB 29%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 18%, GRN 4%

The UKPR polling average continues to show a tie – CON 33%(-1), LAB 33%(-1), LDEM 8%(nc), UKIP 14%(nc), GRN 5%(nc). Some of the individual pollsters are showing consistent leads for one party or the other (YouGov and Populus, for example, are generally showing small Labour leads, ICM and Ashcroft small Conservative leads) so it’s not the case that all the pollsters are showing an exact tie, more than the average of the different companies’ house effects is neck and neck.

Other polls

There was one Scottish poll this week – a new YouGov poll that confirmed their previous 24 point lead for the SNP (tabs), there was also a new YouGov poll of London for the Evening Standard with topline figures of CON 32%, LAB 44%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 10%, GRN 5% (tabs).

There were three constituency polls. Lord Ashcroft released two extra constituency polls with his weekly GB poll, showing the SNP ahead in Edinburgh North and Leith and Edinburgh South. Meanwhile Survation released a new poll of Thanet South, showing Nigel Farage nine points ahead. We should have some more constituency polls from Lord Ashcroft first thing tomorrow morning, including a poll of Rochester and Strood.

Projections

The latest forecasts from Election Forecast, May 2015, Elections Etc, the Guardian and YouGov are below, all continue to show a hung Parliament, but the models disagree on whether the Tories or Labour will be ahead on seats – Elections Etc, Election Forecast and the Guardian all have the Conservatives with more seats, YouGov and the Guardian have Labour slightly ahead.

Elections Etc – Hung Parliament, CON 286(-6), LAB 263(+3), LD 26(+4), SNP 51(nc), UKIP 4(nc)
Election Forecast – Hung Parliament, CON 283(+3), LAB 270(-7), LD 24(-3), SNP 48(+6), UKIP 1(nc)
May 2015 – Hung Parliament, CON 270(+2), LAB 273(-3), LD 26(nc), SNP 55(+1), UKIP 3(nc)
Guardian – Hung Parliament, CON 273(+4), LAB 268(-3), LD 28(-1), SNP 55(nc), UKIP 4(nc)
YouGov Nowcast – Hung Parliament, CON 270(+4), LAB 277(-2), LD 27(nc), SNP 50(nc), UKIP 3(-2)

Here are this week’s polls – slightly fewer than usual because of the Easter bank holiday, meaning we didn’t get the usual Ashcroft poll on Monday.

Survation/Mirror (3/4) – CON 31%, LAB 33%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 18%, GRN 3%
Opinium/Observer (3/4) – CON 33%, LAB 33%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 14%, GRN 7%
YouGov/S Times (4/4) – CON 34%, LAB 33%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 13%, GRN 4%
Populus (6/4) – CON 31%, LAB 33%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 15%, GRN 4%
YouGov/Sun (7/4) – CON 33%, LAB 35%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 14%, GRN 5%
TNS BMRB (7/4) – CON 30%, LAB 33%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 19%, GRN 4%
ComRes/ITV/Mail (8/4) – CON 34%, LAB 33%, LDEM 12%, UKIP 12%, GRN 4%
YouGov/Sun (8/4) – CON 34%, LAB 35%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%, GRN 5%
Populus (8/4) – CON 31%, LAB 33%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 16%, GRN 6%
YouGov/Sun (9/4) – CON 35%, LAB 34%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 12%, GRN 4%
Panelbase (9/4) – CON 31%, LAB 37%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 16%, GRN 4%
Survation/Mirror (9/4) – CON 31%, LAB 35%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 15%, GRN 4%

Most of the polls continue to be close (with a couple of notable exceptions towards the end of the week), but we’ve seen significantly more Labour than Conservative leads in the last week, putting the UKPR polling average back to a one point Labour lead – CON 33%(-1), LAB 34%(nc), LDEM 9%(+1), UKIP 15%(+1), GRN 5%(nc). It’s too early to be confident there has been any real change, but it’s worth keeping an eye on it.

Scottish, constituency and other polling

If it hasn’t been too busy a week for GB polls, there has been a wide selection of other polls. Last weekend there was a ComRes poll of Thanet South (the seat where Nigel Farage is standing) which showed the race as almost a dead heat between the Conservatives, UKIP and Labour. It provoked an attempt by UKIP to try and pooh-pooh ComRes’s methodology, which I wrote about at length here.

There were two Scottish polls, both of them showing no sign of the SNP’s lead fading away. Panelbase found an SNP lead of 16 points over Labour, up from 10 in their previous poll (though it’s possible that was connected to question order). Tabs for that are here. Last night YouGov put out a new Scottish poll conducted after the first of the Scottish leader debates and straddling the second of them – it found the SNP’s lead growing, up to 24 points over Labour. Tabs for that are here.

Lord Ashcroft released another batch of his own constituency polling mid-week, this time returning to some Con -v- Lab marginal seats where he had previously found tight races. These don’t tell us much about the national race (they were a selection of seats that were showing a smaller than average swing to begin with) but give us some details on the individual races. More details here.

Finally, I saw an unusual county level poll of Kent today – conducted by Facts International (the company who do the fieldwork for ComRes’s phone polls for the Mail). They found voting intentions in Kent of CON 39%, LAB 22%, LDEM 6%, UKIP 24%. That would be a 5% swing from Con to Lab, which on a uniform swing wouldn’t be enough for any seats to change hands (Labour’s closest target seat in Kent is Dover, which needs a 5.2% swing). Of course, the seats in Kent that are actually most interesting are not Labour targets, but UKIP ones – holding Rochester & Strood and trying to win Thanet South, and a uniform swing across Kent isn’t much good in predicting the distribution of UKIP’s vote.

Week Fourteen

This week doesn’t seem to have been a good one for the Conservatives. The start of the week was was largely dominated by Labour’s policy on non-doms, the end over arguments about Trident which became overshadowed by rows about the language Michael Fallon used to criticise Ed Miliband. How you tax rich people and whether or not the Conservatives are too nasty, to put it mildly, strong issues for the Tories. I expect we’ll get polling on all of these issues at the weekend.

Yesterday was also the close of nominations for the general election. I’ll be trying to get the Election Guide part of the site updated as soon as possible to reflect the full official candidate lists (so excuse me if I go a bit quiet!)

Projections

The latest forecasts from Election Forecast, May 2015, Elections Etc, the Guardian and YouGov are below. As ever, all show a hung Parliament – currently two are predicting the Tories to have more seats, two Labour to have more seats, and the Guardian’s model a dead heat.

Elections Etc – Hung Parliament, CON 289(-11), LAB 266(+8), LD 22(+2), SNP 49(+2), UKIP 5(nc)
Election Forecast – Hung Parliament, CON 282(-2), LAB 275(-1), LD 28(+2), SNP 41(+1), UKIP 1(nc)
May 2015 – Hung Parliament, CON 265(-13), LAB 279(+12), LD 26(+1), SNP 54(nc), UKIP 3(nc)
Guardian – Hung Parliament, CON 271(-5), LAB 271(+1), LD 29(+1), SNP 53(+3), UKIP 4(nc)
YouGov Nowcast – Hung Parliament, CON 264(+2), LAB 277(+1), LD 28(nc), SNP 55(-1), UKIP 4(-3)