Poll to Poll

  For those who watched, Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions were perhaps the tetchiest exchanges seen between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer as the Prime Minister came under intense questioning about his views on lockdown and who paid the initial costs to refurbish the Downing Street flat. past few weeks having delivered a constant stream of headlines accusing the Prime Minister of sleaze, the latest round of polls indicate that it is not exactly having much of an impact on the public. According to polling by Savanta ComRes which took place between the 23 rd and 25 th April, the headline voting intentions (with changes from 16 th -18 th April in brackets) were as follows: Conservatives 42% (-1), Labour 35% (+1), Liberal Democrats 8% (+1). The latest data by YouGov for The Times meanwhile puts the Conservatives on 44% (unchanged from its last poll), Labour actually down 1 point to 33% with the Liberal Democrats on 7% (+2). Interestingly, further polling by YouGov p...

Ipsos MORI has published its latest political monitor containing a wealth of information for political geeks. 1,090 British adults aged 18 or over were questioned between the 16 th and 22 nd April.   The headline voting intention put the Conservative Party on 40%, Labour on 37%, the Liberal Democrats on 8%, the Green Party on 5% and other parties on 10%. In respect of satisfaction, with a net score of -10, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, had a lower rating than Boris Johnson (-6) and the Government as a whole (-7). The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak had a net rating of +31. As the Prime Minister continues to face damaging headlines over allegations of sleaze on the back of Dominic Cummings’ blog last week in which he questioned both the Prime Minister’s competence and integrity the poll, which took place before it was published, showed that Boris Johnson had a problem going into it. According to the poll, just 34% of those questioned said the Prime Minister was trustworthy,...

With less than a fortnight to go until the elections to the Welsh Parliament, the latest Welsh Political Barometer poll conducted by YouGov, for ITV-Cymru Wales and Cardiff University has today been published . On the constituency vote, the results, with changes from March, put the parties on the following:   Labour: 35% (+3), Conservatives: 24% (-6), Plaid Cymru: 24% (+1), Reform UK: 4% (+1), Liberal Democrats: 3% (-2), Greens: 3% (+1), Abolish the Assembly: 3% (no change) and Others: 3% (+1). For the regional list vote the results were as follows: Labour: 33% (+2), Plaid Cymru: 23% (+1), Conservatives: 22% (-6), Abolish the Assembly: 7% (no change), Greens: 5% (+2), Liberal Democrats: 4% (no change) and Others: 6% (+2). According to the analysis by Professor Roger Awan-Scully at Cardiff University, such results would see the parties securing the following seats: Labour: 26 seats (24 constituency, 2 regional), Plaid Cymru: 17 seats (8 constituency, 9 regional), Conservatives...

That the Conservative Government, headed by Boris Johnson, has enjoyed a bounce in the polls on the back of the successful role out of the COVID-19 vaccination programme is beyond doubt. What will be worrying Labour head office though is just how bad things have now become according to the latest poll. YouGov questioned 1,689 adults across Great Britain between the 13 th and 14 th April for The Times. The results show that in respect of headline voting intentions,   excluding those who did know how they would vote, those who refused to say and those who said they would not vote, the Conservatives were on 43% (up 2 percentage points since earlier this month). Labour meanwhile were on 29% (down 5 points). Just to put that into context at the 2019 General Election which Labour so catastrophically lost, the party secured just over 32% of the votes cast. Asked who they felt that best Prime Minister would be, 34% said Boris Johnson (down 1 point) with 26% saying Keir Starmer ...

If you will excuse the pun, new polling by YouGov for the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary University in London suggests that Labour’s Sadiq Khan is miles ahead of his nearest rival in the mayoral contest due to be held next month. It puts Khan on 47% compared to his Conservative opponent, Shaun Bailey, on 26%. After second preferences are taken into account, Khan leads Bailey 66% to 34%. Somewhat ominously for the Conservative Party, the Institute notes that Bailey is “poised to suffer the worst defeat of a Conservative candidate since the London mayorality was established.” The Institute goes on to note: “The figures reveal that support for Khan is strong amongst Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Londoners, with 63 per cent of BME voters planning to support him, compared to 37 per cent of White voters. 65 per cent of 18-25 year olds intend to vote for Khan compared to only 22 per cent of those over 65. Only 16 per cent of those who voted leave in the EU referendum are intending to...

Ahead of next months’ elections to Holyrood, Ipsos MORI has published its latest Scottish Political Monitor . The polling company interviewed a representative sample of 1,038 adults aged 16+ across Scotland.   Interviews were conducted by telephone between 29 th March and 4 th April 2021. The headline voting intentions for the Scottish Parliament were as follows: For the constituency vote – SNP 53%, Conservatives 20%, Labour 18%, Liberal Democrats 6%, Green Party 2% and other parties on 1%. For the regional list vote – SNP 38%, Conservatives 21%, Labour 18%, Green Party 12%, Liberal Democrats 6%, Alba Party 3% and other parties on 2%. The Scotsman has noted that if such results were replicated universally across Scotland next month the SNP would return 70 of the 129 MSPs at Holyrood, giving them a majority of 11. The Conservatives would take 25 seats, down from 31 in 2016, with Labour taking 19 – down 5. The Scottish Greens would take 11 seats and the Liberal Democ...

Just a few weeks ago I blogged on the battle for Hartlepool ahead of the parliamentary by-election being held on 6 th May and how many Conservatives will be looking at it as an opportunity to further cement its destruction of Labour’s so called ‘Red Wall’. New data out today suggests they would be right to feel confident. Survation polled 502 adults living in the constituency for the Communication Workers Union by phone between 29 th March and 3 rd April. It’s important to emphasise at the outset, as Keiran Pedley from Ipsos Mori has done via twitter that given the sample size it “has a decent margin of error” with a month to go until the vote. Caveats added, the poll puts the Conservative candidate, Jill Mortimer on 49% of the vote, up 20 percentage points on the party’s performance at the 2019 General Election. Labour’s Paul Williams is, according to the poll, on 42%, up four points from 2019. Just to put this into some historical context, if the Conservatives were to ...

Just a matter of days ago this blog reported on polling which questioned if Alex Salmond’s new Alba Party in Scotland was dead on arrival, together with his ambitions for a so called ‘supermajority’ in favour of independence following May’s elections to Holyrood. New data suggests that the Salmond dream might now be looking more likely. The poll, conducted by Panelbase for The Sunday Times, puts the party standings in the constituency vote section as follows: SNP is on 49% (+2 since last month), Conservatives on 22% (-1), Labour 20% (unchanged), the Liberal Democrats on 6% (-1) and Greens unchanged on 2%. In the regional list vote, the SNP is on 39% (-3), the Conservatives on 21% (-1), Labour on 17 % (-2), Liberal Democrats on 5% (-2) and Greens 8% (+2), with Alba on 6% and the pro-Union All For Unity founded by the former leader of Respect, George Galloway, on 4%. Writing for the Sunday Times, Professor Sir John Curtice from Strathclyde University suggests that such a resul...

Is Alex Salmond’s new Alba Party in Scotland dead on arrival? According to a poll published this week, maybe. Under Scotland’s electoral system voters will, this May, be given two votes. As the BBC notes : “People have two votes - one for a constituency MSP, and another for a regional ballot. “There are 73 Constituency MSPs, each elected on a first-past-the-post system similar to the UK general election - the winner is the candidate who receives the most votes in each constituency. “In the regional ballot, people vote for a party. The parties are then allocated a number of MSPs depending on how many votes they receive - once the number of constituencies already won in that region is taken into account - to make the overall result more proportional.” For the regional list vote there are eight electoral regions which each elect seven MSPs. Alex Salmond’s ambition is that by only standing candidates for the regional list vote, it will maximise the number of MSPs elected in t...