So one thing Polling Club would tell you, if there were such
a thing, would be to look beyond the headline Voting Intention numbers that the
hard-of-thinking throw around all the time. They’d also tell you not to talk
about Polling Club, so it might exist after all, but that’s another story.
Anyway. Since we took a perhaps ill-advised look at those very topline figures
last time, this month we thought ‘Public Policy and the Past’ would take a look
below the surface – at the numbers that might really determined who commands
the House of Commons after the next election. Hopefully, it’s imminent, and thousands
of numbers will soon pour across screens that for now remain sad and empty. So
this is not a – shall we say – completely academic question.
The don’t knows –
where are they now?
As you’ll also know if you were with us in January, one
key to any election is the Don’t Knows, the Won’t Says and the Refused. Say one
in five survey respondents tells you that they’re not sure who they’re going to
vote for – even though they’ve clicked on the invite. Now imagine that they are
not a balanced or normal sample of voters – that they all actually favour one ‘side’
or the other. That means that your nice clean 50/50 split from the poll might
actually blow up into a lead of twenty points on polling day. We’ve actually
got a good recent example of this, because in the lead up to the 2017 General
Election a huge slice of ex-Labour voters had gone over to Don’t Know. And hey
presto, by polling day most of them were back, boosting Labour’s score higher
than even its surge in the polls guessed at.
Where are we at with this lot now? Well, the most recent
evidence shows that they are now more likely to be voters who chose the
Conservatives in the recent past, not Labourites disillusioned with the Party’s
recent, well, troubles. Take the most recent Ipsos-Mori Political Monitor. Only five per cent of 2017 Labour voters are now completely unsure how they would vote. Only three
per cent of ex-Conservatives say the same – though the numbers of ‘won’t vote’
pretty much even up the score of those who’ve shed supporters to ‘unsure’ or ‘won’t
turn up’. In the last Survation poll, which returned a slight Labour lead,
Conservative ‘not sures’ were 10.5 per cent to nine per cent. ComRes’ last poll
showed that Don’t Know and Won’t Vote were tied at five per cent of their past
supporters. And so on. One of the causes of what polling fail there was in 2017
came from citizens who weren’t sure which way they’d jump – who turned up to be
Labour voters in disguise. That doesn’t seem to be holding this time.
Leaders… and the
lack of them
Leadership ratings are usually a good indication of
voting intention. When Neil Kinnock and John Major fought it out in 1992, one
indication of how well the Conservatives were actually going to do was the
Prime Minister’s leader on ‘best Prime Minister’. When David Cameron was more popular than Ed Miliband, the suspicion stuck that there was something ‘wrong’ with the
headline voting figures. And so on. So we need to look at these numbers too, to
test visceral reactions to the parties’ main personalities as figureheads and
lightning rods. And what we find here is very interesting – that Theresa May is
unpopular in a normal way, at about the level one would expect for a Prime
Minister who’s now nearly three years in power, while Jeremy Corbyn is very,
very, very unpopular – indeed spectacularly so, and probably more unpopular
than he has ever been.
Let’s take a look at this historically. After a long
period of slowly deflating, recent rows over Brexit and antisemitism appear to
have done further damage to Mr Corbyn’s already-tarnished brand. Ipsos-Mori’s
Political Monitor for January has just given him the highest Unfavourable rating
that any Leader of the Opposition since 1977 has ever recorded – bar none – and
the second-worse net result (of -55) after Michael Foot in August 1982. Now in a world
of increasingly fluid political loyalties, it might not be particularly
surprising that these scores are less ‘sticky’ as it were, but that’s still an
absolutely dreadful result. Theresa May, on the other hand, has a net score of-25 (with 33 per cent satisfied). This is obviously pretty bad too: for
comparison, Donald Trump given some rather different questions has an overall rating of -15 (itself the second-worst in history). But Mrs May’s rating is
about the same as Gordon Brown’s and David Cameron’s at this point in their
Premierships, and better than John Major’s numbers at that point. So it’s not
particularly remarkable. Mr Corbyn’s favourables do now on the other hand
appear to be at an all-time low, since they have also reached the same trough with YouGov.
Those statistics might recover – they did, after all, surge very rapidly during
the 2017 General Election campaign – but for now what we can say here is the
Prime Minister is unpopular, and the Leader of the Opposition is very, very,
very unpopular.
The extraordinary
longevity of the Scottish National Party
One of the main battlefields next time will be Scotland. Which
is one of the reasons why the next General is so unpredictable. Labour must
make progress here to govern with an overall majority. The Conservatives must try
to hang on to their impressive 2017 gains if they are to get anywhere near an
absolute advantage in the House of Commons. At the moment? They’re both falling
back - Labour slightly more than the Conservatives - in the face of a small but noticeable bump in
support for the Scottish National Party. Partly we suspect because they have
that vital political quality of clarity when they talk about Brexit, and partly
because the Conservatives’ main star Ruth Davidson has been absent on maternity
leave, the SNP have been clocking up some pretty impressive poll leaders –
which is extraordinary when you think they have been in power in Edinburgh for
over a decade. An average of the last two Scottish polls puts them on 38.5 per
cent, up from the 36.9 per cent they gained last time. Labour has fallen back
rather, from 27.1 per cent to 23.5 per cent.
This matters a lot. Seven out of Labour’s top twenty targets are held by the SNP, and all of them have majorities under 1,000 voters
which will fall on a swing of less than one per cent. Right now, polling says the SNP will hold them all. Yes, Labour can govern
without making a single gain in Scotland. But the more they win there, the less
they will have to rely on and listen to SNP leader Nichola Sturgeon, and the less
in government will they risk English voters’ ire by appearing to rest on
Scottish voters and Scottish MPs. Looking at the other side of the equation, the
Conservatives have eight seats vulnerable to the SNP on a swing of less than five per cent. These are much less vulnerable on the whole than Labour’s vulnerable
Scottish outposts, but the small size of Scottish seats (and a fall in turnout
between 2015 and 2017) means that we’re not talking very many actual votes here
– perhaps three or four thousand at most. Lose just a few of those, or worse
face SNP voters who stayed home in 2017 coming back to the polls, and the
Tories could lose a scattering of absolutely vital seats. At the moment, the SNP
has advanced enough to put all but one of Labour’s seats in danger, but not far
enough to expose more than the Tories’ Stirling seat. None of this changes the size of likely Commons coalitions. But if the SNP push forward any
more, the balance might start to change again as Conservative seats come within their range.
The unbearable lightness of council by-elections
Last but very much not least, we really should take a
look at local council by-elections – contests that go on round the country week
in, week out – and for the most part with very little fanfare. Sure, these are
low-turnout affairs, they often throw up eccentric results, and in various
parts of the country they are contested by local or regional parties that have
very little chance of winning a Parliamentary seat. Last Thursday night, a Tower Hamlets-only party won a ward off Labour, while an excellent and surprising
Labour win in deepest Buckinghamshire was rather marred by the fact that their
candidate had been suspended from the Party before the polls had even opened.
So you can’t put a vast store by these results. You can, however, use them as a
broad-brush overall guide to exactly where the parties are. If one of them was
absolutely tanking or surging, you would expect to see it show up here.
Except that’s not what we see at all. In fact, the overall
stasis that we observe from the national Voting Intention headlines is borne
out here too. There has been a small swing from the Conservatives to Labour
since the 2017 General Election, though one that seems to have become a little
less powerful over time (for now disregarding the small number of results we’ve
had in 2019). The swing is a modest 2.3 per cent since the last General Election,
and since the 2018 local elections it has been running at just under the two per cent mark. It’s not exactly a King’s ransom for the Opposition, especially
when we note exactly when these wards were last fought. They were last up for election in the 2015-18 cycle, four local elections in which Labour certainly did not do very well. They lost the National Equivalent Share of the Vote in
three out of the four, and only in one of them (2016) did they squeak ahead,
that time by a single point – 33 per cent to 32 per cent. So this two per cent
swing means that Labour might overall be on average there or there about with
the Tory score – exactly what we would expect from the opinion polls. It’s not
much of an insight, but as with ever confirming what you think you
already know isn’t nothing.
Inner mechanics and outward appearance
So there we have it. Below the big-ticket numbers, there
are a number of very interesting things that we can say about any upcoming
General Election. What we know about the Don’t Knows tells us that they are not
so maldistributed as they were in 2016 and 2017. Labour is unlikely to be able
to draw on such a ready-made pool of sympathetic voters again. Another surge
might happen, but it will need a different source this time. Leadership ratings
are a bit trickier, because Mrs May has made clear that she will not fight any election
held in the medium- to long-term. If there’s an election soon, though, her
numbers will matter. And they’re really bad – though not so bad as Mr Corbyn’s,
who is about as popular as video rental. Again, that might change, just like it
did in 2017, though to come back from these lows twice might be a harder ask
again. For now, amazingly, the Prime Minister has the edge.
In Scotland, Labour face a greater challenge than do the Conservatives,
not that it will matter in terms of who will sit in Downing Street – the SNP
could not possibly do any sort of deal with the Conservatives. Even so, what
really matters there will be whether the Conservatives lose more than one or
two seats. If they don’t, so much the better are their prospects of retaining
power. Local by-elections tell us that we are probably are reading this all
aright – that the two major parties in England and Wales do seem to be locked together in a macabre political struggle to bestride the realm of the unpopular. This time, the inner mechanics
of what we know seem to confirm the words up in lights. It might not always be
so: we’ll keep tracking the detailed churning of the data, and get right back
to you if things change.
Update, 12
February: YouGov tells us more
No sooner had the blog above been posted, but pollsters
over at YouGov published an update of results from their famous Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification model (or MRP for short). Now although this got things
pretty much spot on at the last election, we shouldn’t deify MRP as anything
more than an interesting new piece in the puzzle. But it is pretty much the
closest thing we have to the state of the art right now, and it’s where most polling
is going. Take an absolutely massive sample, and map it onto all sorts of
turnout and demographic data, and you can much more accurately project a
seat-by-seat analysis. And lo and behold, what YouGov have found is pretty much
in the ballpark as all the straws in the wind above told us. The
Conservatives do indeed have their noses in front, as their continuing hold
over their 2017 voters, their leadership ratings and council byelection results
have been indicating they might. Labour are as we suggested going backwards in
Scotland, with five of their seven seats there in deep danger, and none of the
Conservatives’ Scottish seats looking likely to fall to the SNP. So – it all
fits. We’ve got a good (if blurry) picture. Whether that scene withstands the
Brexit hurricane or an actual election campaign is another matter.
