Author Archives: Stephen Tall

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?