I’m puzzled by some of the coverage in today’s News of the World / ICM poll of voters in Labour - Conservative marginals.

The Conservative share of the vote in that poll is 40%. At the last general election their share of the vote in those seats was 38% (assuming that the same seats have been polled as were polled in their marginals poll last autumn; that’s certainly how the newspaper’s report reads). That’s a gain of only 2%.

However, the last national ICM poll - in today’s Sunday Telegraph - has the Conservatives on 39%. That’s a gain of 6% on the general election.

In other words - the poll shows the Conservatives doing worse in the key marginal seats than they are doing across the country as a whole. The obvious conclusion? Lord Ashcroft’s much-vaunted key seats operation isn’t nearly as good as some Conservatives think (as indeed its results in 2005 demonstrated).

Curiously Nick Sparrow of ICM comments that, “Today’s results suggest the marginals situation is worse than is indicated by the national polls.” It’s not clear to me how this really stacks up. For example, if you look at swing rather than just Conservative share of the vote, the poll gives a 5% swing to the Conservatives in the marginals but there is a 7% swing in today’s national ICM poll. I’ve emailed Nick for his comments on this, but the comments thread is open to all…

UPDATE: Nick Sparrow has been in touch. It looks as if the News of the World was wrong when it said, “The last time we ran our rule over the 145 marginal seats six months ago…” (my emphasis) as actually the seats polled weren’t the same as were polled six months ago:

No they are not the same seats. When we are asked to do this type of poll we first look at the sort of swing suggested by the national polls. In this case we estimated the Conservatives on about 40% (+7%) and Labour on about 30% (-6%) to get an estimated national swing of 6.5%. So we chose all seats where Labour came first and the Tories second where a 10% swing would lead to a change in party MP, so as to include all seats that could possibly fall even with a larger than national swing of 6.5%. It is in these seats we found a 9% swing.

Vote share we got this time is as follows 40% Con, Lab = 32%, Libs = 16% and others = 12%.

It is hardly a surprise to read a piece from John Rentoul in The Independent painting a bleak picture for the Liberal Democrats, but there are two particular puzzles about today’s article:

no one has cast real votes in real ballot boxes since the Sedgefield and Ealing Southall by-elections

Err, local council by-elections anyone? If in your view by-elections don’t count as ‘real votes in real ballot boxes’, the logic applies just as much to local as Westminster by-elections. If they do count, well then once again the logic applies just as much to local as Westminster by-elections. It’s really rather difficult to see how you can count one whilst discounting the other as being ‘real votes in real ballot boxes’.

Looking at council by-election would, mind you, paint a rather different picture, what with there having been many good Liberal Democrat results in council by-elections during the period in which Rentoul is saying has been all doom and gloom for the party. And that brings us to:

What is most surprising is that the election of Clegg just before Christmas had no effect on Lib- Dem standing.

In brief: not so.

At greater length: let’s have a look at what the opinion polls tell us about the situation in December compared with now and looking at the fieldwork (rather than publication) dates of polls.

ComRes: 16% in December, 17% in latest poll (March); change +1
ICM: 18%, 20% (April); +2
MORI: 14%, 19% (April); +5
Populus: 16%, 19% (April);+3
YouGov: 15% (average of three polls), 17% (April); +2

Overall: 15.8%, 18.4%; +2.6

The months running up to the 2005 general election are as good a benchmark as any to compare these ratings with. In all the polls in January, February and March 2005 the party averaged just over 20% in the polls. In other words, in the few months since Nick Clegg was elected leader the party has closed approaching two-thirds of this gap. Not bad going really.

(By the way, although a change of, say +1, in one individual poll should be treated with caution given the margins of error, the consistency of the picture across a large number of polls means you can safely draw conclusions, and the overall picture of steady growth in party support is reflected across the whole period: this isn’t just an artifact of the polls used in the table above.)

Of course, you might take a different view about whether 2005 is an appropriate benchmark on whether approaching two-thirds is enough so far, but it is hard to see how you can say there has been “no effect”.

You’re a Sunday newspaper. You commission a poll from YouGov. It shows the Conservatives back up to the level of support in an opinion poll that you commissioned from YouGov in December. So how do you report it?

If you’re the Sunday Times, you report it as the highest Conservative rating for since 1992. Oops.

We tend not to be too poll-obsessed here at LDV - of course we look at them, as do all other politico-geeks, but viewed in isolation no one poll will tell you very much beyond what you want to read into it. Looked at over a reasonable time-span and, if there are enough polls, you can see some trends.

Here, in chronological order, are the results of the most recent six polls since our last round-up on 29th February:

Tories 40%, Labour 33%, Lib Dems 16% - YouGov/Telegraph (1st Mar)
Tories 37%, Labour 34%, Lib Dems 19% - Populus/Times (11th Mar)
Tories 40%, Labour 31%, Lib Dems 20% - ICM/News of the World (16th Mar)
Tories 43%, Labour 27%, Lib Dems 16% - YouGov/Sunday Times (16th Mar)
Tories 42%, Labour 29%, Lib Dems 21% - ICM/Guardian (18th Mar)
Tories 43%, Labour 29%, Lib Dems 17% - YouGov/Telegraph (28th Mar)

Which gives us an average rating for the parties in March as follows, compared with February’s average:
Tories 41% (+2%), Labour 31% (-2%), Lib Dems 18% (n/c)

Generally I’m sceptical that opinion polls tell you over much about the fluctuations in the daily churn of political life; most movements, up and down, are within the margin of error. However, it does seem to be the case that Alastair Darling’s budget has proven something of a watershed for the Labour Government: three of the four post-budget polls have shown them below 30%.

There’s been much speculation why this might be, given that none of the budget measures in themselves seem to have been especially unpopular. Perhaps it was just the general drab disappointment of this budget, another confirmation that Gordon Brown’s premiership promises precious little ambition. Of course, half the polls published in March were from YouGov, which has tended to be the most pro-Tory pollster (though usually at the expense of the Lib Dems, rather than Labour).

It will be interesting to see the next Ipsos-Mori poll. So far, they have been the only pollster all year to discern a Labour lead (of 1%, back in January). If they too show Labour’s support dipping to c.30%, then alarm bells will really start to ring at Labour HQ.

For the Lib Dems, March showed another incremental increase in poll support, not displayed in our average owing to rounding down to 18% this month (but up to 18% last month). This in spite of the difficulties the party experienced around the Lisbon Treaty referendum. Clearly there’s some truth in the adage that if there’s one thing worse than being talked about, it’s not being talked about.

Nick Clegg’s first 100 days might not yet have shown meteoric progress in the polls; but there has been solid progress, and the leadership will be quietly pleased to see our average ratings in the high teens, and consistently at or around 20% with ICM.

It’s time for a new poll on this site, and this time the question is:

Do you support the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill’s proposal to allow animal-human embryos for medical research?

Cast your vote in the Poll section in the column to the right.

The final results to our previous poll were:

Do you think a party political leadership can work as a job-share?

Yes 75 (19%)
No 329 (81%)

No doubt you were looking at your newspapers yesterday, and feeling not very happy about this poll in The Sunday Times:

YouGov poll reports 16% lead for Conservatives : Con 43% Lab 27% Lib Dems 16%

My reaction to this poll is “Whoopee!”

Now before you think the worst, no, I have not succumbed to the charms of David Cameron, nor will I contest the forthcoming local elections as a Conservative. No, I will be contesting the local elections as a Liberal Democrat because in several councils across the country that poll suggests we could well have another barnstormer of a local election (just as we did in 2004).

It is a well known fact that in local elections, the Liberal Democrats do very well indeed when compared to the national poll ratings, and because of the timings of past local elections it is possible to quantify just how well.

In 1997, the Lib Dems polled 18% in the general, but 25% in the county elections. In 2001, the Lib Dems rose 1% at the general election (19%) and in the county elections polled 25% again and in 2005, polled 23% in the general and a very impressive 28% in the counties. All of which suggests that on average the Lib Dems poll 6% better in local elections than general elections: by a similar degree the Conservatives poll 3% better, and Labour poll 10% worse, in local elections than general elections.

Therefore, if we take the average of the polls so far this month - Con 40%, Lab 32%, Lib Dem 17% - and apply those average changes to it, we get a 2008 local election forecast of:

Con 43%, Lab 22%, Lib Dem 23%

thus ensuring that Labour (the governing party) are consigned to their 4th successive set of local elections finishing in third place. And how does this help us Lib Dems you may well ask?

Manchester: Lab 61 councillors, Lib Dems 34 councillors. (If people want to vote anti-Labour, it’s no point voting Conservative, is it?)

Oxford: Lib Dems 19 councillors, Lab 17 councillors, Greens 8 councillors. (Which party is the best place to take overall control in Oxford? - it’s certainly not the Conservatives or Greens.)

Ceredigion: Plaid Cymru 16 councillors, Lib Dems 9 councillors, Lab 1 councillor. (Seeing as Labour and Plaid Cymru are essentially the government in Wales, why vote Plaid when that means you are backing the Welsh Assembly Government?)

So as you can see in loads of councils across the UK, the Liberal Democrats are the main challengers to Labour, and the party best placed to gain control.

So have a good fuel up on Easter Eggs next weekend, so that on Wednesday, 26th March, onwards you can walk into your local returning officer’s office, hand over your nomination forms, and say to the electorate: “I’m a Liberal Democrat candidate, and we are the only party who can win control of this council!”

* Harry Hayfield is a Lib Dem activist from Ceredigion constituency and is a prospective community council candidate for the Henfynwy Community Council.

Unusual first question: asking whether I’d vote “at a polling station” or not vote at all. Person bit flumoxed when I said I’d vote by post next time - neither not voting nor a pollint station.

Usual political questions - how vote next time, last time etc.

Certainty to vote questions. Then on to  today’s big topic. Read more »

So, now we have it nice and clear. The “I Want A Referendum” campaign was challenged yesterday to produce the poll question and answer to justify their statement about their ICM poll:

The poll also finds that if only one question is to be asked then Liberal Democrat voters would prefer a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty to a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.

Their answer? Neither could they produce the poll question to back-up this claim nor did they say, “Oh sorry, mistake in writing up our press release; we meant to say something different.”

A curiosity from the “I want a referendum” campaign. Their news release today claims:

I Want a Referendum today releases an ICM poll of 1,000 people who voted Liberal Democrat at the last General Election … The poll also finds that if only one question is to be asked then Liberal Democrat voters would prefer a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty to a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.

And yet the full tables from ICM contain no such question, which as far as I can see leaves only two possibilities:

a. They’ve made up or got horribly wrong their own poll results in their own press release, or

b. They’re keeping hidden some of the poll answers (though, as the press release has mentioned them under the British Polling Council rules, ICM should release them).

Anyway, if you want to see poll results which do really answer the “what sort of referendum would you want?” question, see the results of the poll from MORI issued by the Liberal Democrats today. They show the public in favour by 2:1 of having an in/out referendum rather than a Lisbon Treaty referendum.

Nick Clegg has just finished a press briefing at which he published results of a poll commissioned from MORI, which shows that by a margin of 2:1 voters prefer the Liberal Democrat policy of having a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU to David Cameron’s policy of only having a limited referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Only 8% of people want a referendum on both.

Today the right-wing papers are in full cry about a referendum claiming their view is representative of what the public wants. The Times leader says ‘Let the People Speak’ while The Sun puns its way to ‘EU must listen’.

Now the public have spoken about what sort of referendum they really want, will they listen…?

We tend not to be too poll-obsessed here at LDV - of course we look at them, as do all other politico-geeks, but viewed in isolation no one poll will tell you very much beyond what you want to read into it. Looked at over a reasonable time-span and, if there are enough polls, you can see some trends.

Here, in chronological order, are the results of the most recent 10 polls since our last round-up on 25th January:

Tories 41%, Labour 30%, Lib Dems 17% - ComRes/Independent (24th Feb)
Tories 40%, Labour 34%, Lib Dems 16% - YouGov/Economist (21st Feb)
Tories 37%, Labour 34%, Lib Dems 21% - ICM/Guardian (17th Feb)
Tories 41%, Labour 32%, Lib Dems 16% - YouGov/Sunday Times (15th Feb)
Tories 40%, Labour 31%, Lib Dems 17% - Populus/Times (3rd Feb)
Tories 37%, Labour 32%, Lib Dems 21% - ICM/Sunday Telegraph (31st Jan)
Tories 38%, Labour 30%, Lib Dems 17% - ComRes/Independent (27th Jan)
Tories 41%, Labour 33%, Lib Dems 16% - YouGov/Telegraph (23rd Jan)
Tories 37%, Labour 38%, Lib Dems 16% - Ipsos-MORI (23rd Jan)
Tories 37%, Labour 35%, Lib Dems 20% - ICM/Guardian (20th Jan)

Which gives us an average rating for the parties in February (ish) as follows, compared with January’s average:
Tories 39% (-1%), Labour 33% (n/c), Lib Dems 18% (+2%)

What’s remarkable about the polls is not the fluctuations they show during the month, but quite how static the polls are – at least when you look at them according to the polling company responsible:

ComRes (2 polls):
Tories 41% / 38%, Labour 30% / 30%, Lib Dems 17% / 17%
YouGov (3 polls):
Tories 40% / 41% / 41%, Labour 34% / 32% / 33%, Lib Dems 16% / 16% / 16%
ICM (3 polls):
Tories 37% / 37% / 37%, Labour 34% / 32% / 35%, Lib Dems 21%, 21%, 20%

So – even though the polls are taken over a 4-week period, during which all sorts of minutiae gets the political blogosphere’s knickers in a knot – the three polling companies which published more than one poll have produced results in which the parties each achieve broadly the same level of support using that company’s methodology.

Ultimately party hacks will choose to believe the polling company which produces the results they want to hear; or at least ignore those they don’t want to hear.

Tories will laud YouGov, Lib Dems are highly sceptical. Why? Because YouGov tends to produce the most favourable Tory levels of support, and tends to produce the worse Lib Dem ratings. But, of course, we Lib Dems love ICM – which consistently shows the party nudging or above 20% - while Tories are distinctly lukewarm about always being in the mid-to-high 30s%.

The one thing of which we can be certain is this: with very few exceptions the polls will be given a prominence and interpretation by the newspaper which commissioned them way in excess of their actual significance. Polling is an art, not a science.

A small but perfectly formed poll on PinkNews.co.uk puts Lib Dem mayoral hopeful into City Hall this May.

Although Labour’s Ken Livingstone wins a plurality of votes, he fails to get over the threshold of 50% needed in the first round for an Supplementary Vote win.

Second-placed Paddick takes enough second-preference votes to push him a hair-breadth ahead of Ken and win the mayoralty.

In the words of Peter Snow, it’s all a bit of fun, and the sample of voters asked is very low - well under the thousand often considered the gold-standard of political polls.

But it’s good news all round for the Lib Dems amongst those polled.  Not only does Brian run Ken very close in the first round for London Mayor, and edge into the lead in the second, but also those asked which party they’d support in the London Borough elections also put the Lib Dems ahead of all other parties.

A regular absurdity of political opinion poll coverage in the UK is the way that media outlets often pretend that polls commissioned by other organisation do not exist.

If a polling company carries out, for example, two opinion polls in identical ways for two different newspapers, then the newspaper that publishes the second poll almost invariably ignores the first poll when publishing vote share changes, and instead bases them on the previous poll published in its own pages - even though that previous poll is older than the one published by its rival.

It’s as if at a general election someone reported the change in seats compared with not the last general election, but with the one before - just because they happened not to have covered the last one.

A round of applause then for Julian Glover and The Guardian, who left all this behind when reporting the latest ICM poll and instead make reference not just to the previous Guardian/ICM poll but also to the most recent ICM poll, which happened to appear in a different publication.

Now, to get a standing ovation someone would have to admit that a poll they’ve just published is a rogue poll which falls outside the normal margin of error for sampling (as you would expect around 1 in 20 to be - i.e. one about every other month in the UK as typically there are around 10 different polls with national voting intention figures published each month).

We tend not to be too poll-obsessed here at LDV - of course we look at them, as do all other politico-geeks, but viewed in isolation no one poll will tell you very much beyond what you want to read into it. Looked at over a reasonable time-span and, if there are enough polls, you can see some trends.

Here, in chronological order, are the results of the six polls conducted in December (hat-tip: Anthony Wells’ UK Polling Report Blog, which provides by far the best analysis of the polls on the web):

Tories 39%, Labour 34%, Lib Dems 18% - ICM/Guardian (19th Dec)
Tories 43%, Labour 31%, Lib Dems 16% - YouGov/Telegraph (19th Dec)
Tories 41%, Labour 30%, Lib Dems 16% - ComRes/Independent (16th Dec)
Tories 45%, Labour 32%, Lib Dems 14% - YouGov/Sunday Times (14th Dec)
Tories 40%, Labour 32%, Lib Dems 16% - Populus/Times (9th Dec)
Tories 42%, Labour 35%, Lib Dems 14% - Ipsos-MORI (7th Dec)

Which gives us an average rating for the parties in December as follows (compared with November’s average):
Tories 42% (+2%), Labour 32% (-1%), Lib Dems 16% (n/c)

Back in November, our poll round-up showed Labour plunging 5% following the debacle of the-election-that-never-was. It’s arguable Gordon Brown might be relieved that the bad press of the last month hasn’t resulted in an even sharper downturn than December’s 1% fall. What will concern Labour more is if the polls do not show any significant upturn in the coming few months, as May’s local elections approach. At the moment they seem locked in the 30-35% box where they were contained in the latter months of Tony Blair’s premiership. Six months after the Brown succession, and Labour’s back where they were.

The Tories have had a pretty good December. I commented last month - when the party was unchanged from October’s average of 40% - that “the drop in Labour’s support seems either to have transferred to the Lib Dems or Others, rather than to the official opposition. Again, we’ll have to wait to see if David Cameron is able to capitalise sustainably on Labour’s misfortunes.” The jury’s still out on whether Mr Cameron is building solid, election-winning foundations; but it would be churlish not to acknowledge that his party is gaining some momentum - albeit perhaps by default - in inverse proportion to the rate at which Labour is losing credibility.

The Lib Dems have stabilized since the nadir of October, when our poll average languished at 13%. In truth, we might have hoped to have done slightly better owing both to the fillip of Vince Cable’s impressive turn as acting leader, and the publicity surrounding the party leadership contest. Still, 16% is some kind of base for Nick Clegg to build upon, and does give the lie to those political commentators who still think that two-party politics is due some kind of pendulum-inevitable return. It isn’t. Two-party politics is dead.

Finally, as a Christmas treat, here are the previous December poll averages for the parties over the past decade:

Read more »

Lib Dem Voice want to find out, and we’ll be running a New Year poll to find the liberal voice in British politics which has most inspired you in the last year. But as a little twist, we want to look outside the Liberal Democrat party – and find the greatest liberal who’s not a member of our party.

So, who would you pick? It could be a member of another party or one of the majority of Britons who belong to no party. It could even be someone who isn’t British themselves, but has had a big impact on liberalism in this country in 2007. And what should qualify as “a liberal”? The shortlisting panel, chaired by Cambridge MP and Lib Dem Shadow Solicitor General David Howarth, will be watching discussion and debates in the comments when deliberating.

Let us know your nominations in the comments - and feel free to start debating different candidates’ merits - and our panel will pick a shortlist for a poll in which readers can choose their Liberal Voice of 2007.

That’s the suggestion that was made last night in a comment on Lib Dem Voice by Martin Tod, the party’s prospective Parliamentary candidate for Winchester, who noted:

Just had a quick look and there’s an important technical flaw with the poll… The poll sample’s age split isn’t even close to the party membership’s actual age split. It (unfortunately) hugely overstates young voters and understates those over 60.

If my reading of the data is right, YouGov’s weighted sample of 678 Lib Dem members comprised:

* 237 (35%) 18-39 year-olds
* 217 (32%) 40-59 year-olds
* 224 (33%) 60+ year-olds

I don’t know how this corresponds to the overall party membership; but my guess, if only from observation, is that Martin is right, and that the weighted YouGov sample is indeed hugely overstating the proportion of members under the age of 40. Which candidate this might have most benefited - or disbenefited - is simply conjecture. But perhaps the results of the poll should be treated with great caution until this point can be clarified.

UPDATE:

Peter Kellner has kindly provided this response:

We derived our age profile by comparing the profile of Lib Dem members in our panel with the demographic profile of our overall panel. This gave us a median age of 51. Given that there may have been changes since the Seyd/Whiteley survey which was, I believe, some years ago [and gave an average age of 59 for Lib Dem members], we were comfortable with this.

However, my calculation is that were we to have weighted the data using a median age of 59, this would give us Clegg 55-Huhne 45, instead of 56-44.

Given the margin of error that is always liable to occur in a sample of 678, this difference seems too slight to cause huge concern. The main point remains the one that we made to Sky News when delivering the results: given the large number of don’t knows among those who had not yet voted, the result could be anywhere between a comfortable Clegg victory and a very tight finish with the contest going either way.

The full results of that YouGov / Sky News leadership poll are now available online here: these give the full breakdown of figures, together with the answers to questions which weren’t reported by the media at the weekend.

A few observations from my reading of the data (which I am taking at face value while recognising it might be wildly inaccurate):

Leadership election turnout

According to the poll, a full 93% of members seem likely to vote - just 7% responded saying they didn’t know if they’d vote at all, and 1% declaring they would not vote at all. This points either to a remarkably high turnout - in the 2006 contest, just over 70% of members voted - or suggests the YouGov sample includes a high level of motivated Lib Dems (not that that necessarily matters. After all, the poll is meant to try and predict what those who actually vote will do).

Nick v. Chris

If the poll is right - and Chris Huhne’s campaign website is currently citing some of the figures on his website - it suggests Chris has a huge uphill task ahead: those who have voted have split 58:42 in Nick Clegg’s favour; while those who have yet to vote are also breaking in Nick’s favour by 31:26. It is true, of course, that 44% of those who intend to vote still don’t know who for… Chris will need them to flock to him in droves.

It is clear that one quality Chris’s supporters appreciate about their candidate more than any other is competency: 50% believe he is more competent than Nick Clegg. Rather astonishingly, not one single Chris supporter thinks Nick is the more competent of the two; though, to be fair, only 2% of Nick’s supporters say that Chris is more competent. Overall, 61% say there’s not much difference in competency between the two candidates.

Clearly the make or break question for many is voter appeal, and it is here that Nick bests Chris: only 9% of those polled say Chris has significantly more, while 53% say Nick does. Among Nick’s supporters, fully 86% identify this quality with their guy; only one-quarter of Chris’s supporters think he has the most voter appeal.

However, Chris’s supporters - 64% of them - are much more likely to say that their candidate has the best policy programme, compared with 39% of Nick’s supporters who think Nick comes up trumps. Overall, by 28:19, Lib Dems favour Chris’s policies, though almost half say there’s “not much difference” between the two.

Focusing on the negative, the poll finds that:
- 33% of Chris’s supporters believe Nick will “make a poor leader because he has changed his mind too often on important policy issues”; and
- 66% of Nick’s supporters believe Chris will “make a poor leader because he failed to prevent his campaign team publishing a leaflet entitled, ‘Calamity Clegg’”.

If not Nick or Chris, who?

Read more »

MORI have just popped up on their website their latest poll (Tories 41 - up 1, Labour 32 - down 3, Lib Dems 17 - up 4). Although, as Stephen frequently comments, LDV doesn’t generally do polls, this is a good moment to have a look at the picture in the changes in party support in the last few polls.

If you take the last eleven polls and in each case compare support for a party with its support in the previous poll from the same polling company (but treating MORI’s face-to-face and phone polls as two separate series as that’s not really comparing like with like), this is what you find:

• The Liberal Democrats have been up in eight, unchanged in one, down in one (and one unknown)
• The Conservatives have been up in four, down in six and unchanged in two
• Labour have been down in nine and unchanged in two

In other words, the lead the Tories have been opening up over Labour is far more to do with the Liberal Democrats rising in support than to do with the Conservatives’ own popularity.