Three polls published tonight:
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Populus in The Times … CON 36%(+4), LAB 27%(-1), LIB DEM 28%(-3)
YouGov in The Sun … CON 33%(nc), LAB 29%(+1), LIB DEM 28%(-1)
ComRes for ITV/The Independent … CON 33%(+1), LAB 29%(+1), LDEM 29%(-2)
The big shift is in the Populus survey – however, the last time they polled was at the peak of the Lib Dems’ post-debate surge, so the result is pretty much in line with other polls showing the Lib Dems hovering around the 30% mark – albeit the Tories are at their highest point since before Nick Clegg’s rise to fame.
I suggested in yesterday’s Pollwatch we might see a small shift away from the Lib Dems:
My hunch is that Lib Dem support will slip a little this week because of the media focus on the negative impact of a hung parliament with some ‘undecided’ Labour and Tory voters returning to the safe comfort of their status quo parties.
Until we’ve seen the third and fnal debate, though, I don’t think we’ll be any the wiser about what these poll fluctations might actually mean; and even then whether the polls translate into reality will depend on the effectiveness of the parties’ ‘get out the vote’ operations.
Anthony Wells’ UK Polling Report ‘poll of polls’ shows the smallest of shifts from the Lib Dems to the Tories:
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CON 34%, LAB 27%, LIB DEM 29%
Populus also conducted a Scottish-only poll which produced the following result:
CON 16%, LAB 37%, LDEM 24%, SNP 19%
This is an amazingly strong recovery for the Lib Dems north of the border, and suggests the party will suffer no losses and may even make a gain or two come 6th May.
Will the pollsters get it right at this election? Anthony Wells looks at some of the reasons folk have said it might go awry – more young people voting, not accounting for mobile phone-inly (rather than landline) voters, an increased turnout – and concluded:
The bottom line on a lot of questions of whether pollsters would pick up a new trend is that pollsters don’t actually make many presumptions up front about how people will behave. With a few minor and well evidenced exceptions (such as Populus and ICM’s reallocation of don’t knows on the assumption they are likely to vote how they did last time), voting intention figures are based on what people tell pollsters, not the pollsters’ preconceived assumptions.
Things can go always go wrong of course, and I expect it’s more likely to happen at an election where there has been a large shift in support, but I can’t see any particular reason to expect the polls to get it wrong this time.
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10 Comments
Nick has to stick to his firm, simple, confident “man on the moon” message, and not get wrong-footed again. The IFS report (lead item on the BBC News) won’t have done either Cameron or Brown any good. For us, it is rather like the election expenses – not as bad as the others.
I am following your election from NZ with interest, and as an advocate of electoral reform I hope the Lib-Dems do well. In my going from website to website I found a reference to an electoral system called Direct Party and Representative Voting (DPR). The system would seem to meet to some of the concerns of Conservatives – it would keep single member electorates with candidates voted in using FPTP, yet may appeal to others because it is fair through using a party vote to determine overall proportionality in parliament. I later found a site dedicated to its promotion http://WWW.dprvoting.org. Has anyone heard about this system?
DPR sounds a bizarre system (if I have understood it) in that MPs would be of different strengths depending on the party vote in their areas. How on earth House of Commons votes could be undertaken without a computer I don’t know!
Also the website says there wouldn’t be two types of MP as with Additional Member, but clearly there would be a multiplicity of types from 10%ers to 100%ers!!
Additional Member would be much to be preferred over this system if we couldn’t get STV.
DPR is a degenerate form of direct representation (which really does what DPR claims to do), and the only difference between them is that DPR soft-discards most of the votes cast.
Consider: under DPR, we get a government with party strengths of CON 34%, LAB 27%, LIB DEM 29%. Suppose I live in a constituency that elected a Tory MP. The Lib Dem party will inevitably represent 29% of the vote in Parliament, so when there is an issue that matters to me, I write to my Lib Dem representative and express my desire for them to vote the way I want… wait no, I don’t have one. My vote has been soft-discarded; nobody in parliament represents my views. There are plenty of Lib Dems in parliament, but they’re representing people in other parts of the country.
The real system which makes this idea work is direct representation. That one is dead easy to understand: forget about the useless “one MP per constituency, so every MP is representing a group which mostly disagrees with him” idea. Anybody who stands for election gets elected, and their voting strength in parliament is precisely the number of votes cast in their favour. You get a dozen MPs per constituency, you know exactly which one is representing you, and the vote in parliament is a precise representation of the electorate.
Why don’t we do that? Because it can’t support professional politicians. Such a system does not allow for any way to have each representative supplied with a staff and a salary, so they can work full time on understanding the issues placed before them. It’s arguable whether this is better or worse, but obviously the current politicians aren’t going to support it.
Which brings us back to STV, which gets all of the above right and has no major disadvantages (unless you’re Cameron, because STV won’t ever make him King).
For some reason, I never thought of “direct representation”, as described by Andrew Suffield. Sounds brilliant to me! (Whereas “DPR” is obviously pants.) Could be workable, with a minimum threshold for election (say 5%), so few constituencies would have more than four or five members; and the existence of professional politicians could be supported by having a couple of hundred explicitly full time (i.e. well paid and supported) positions, elected on a regional, proportional basis by the whole House. Pure pipe-dream of course. Back to politics now.
“Why don’t we do that? Because it can’t support professional politicians. Such a system does not allow for any way to have each representative supplied with a staff and a salary, so they can work full time on understanding the issues placed before them.”
Couldn’t they be supplied with salary and allowances pro rata (up to the current limits), and allowed to stand in more than one constituency? That way a party on (say) 15% of the vote could have an full-time MP representing about half a dozen neighbouring constituencies.
You can dream up a whole bunch of ways to fund it, but nobody’s managed to get it to work. Mind you, I don’t think anybody’s given it a serious attempt on a national level…
Has anyone given it a serious attempt at any level? I’d be interested to know what happened.
In the absence of “Pollwatch Day 23”, here are today’s polls:
ComRes CON 36%(+3), LAB 29%(nc), LDEM 26%(-3).
YouGov CON 34%(+1), LAB 27%(-2), LDEM 31%(+3).
Harris CON 32%(-2), LAB 25%(-1), LDEM 30%(+1).
ComRes does seem to be surprisingly volatile, considering that only half of the sample changes each day. The other two wouldn’t be bad, if it weren’t for an ICM poll of Lib Dem target seats, which shows the swing in Labour-held seats in line with the national polls, but no discernible swing in Tory-held seats.
Perhaps not surprising if one interprets the national polls as the Lib Dems gaining at the expense of Labour losing something like a quarter of its vote, while the Tories stay roughly where they are. In Tory-held Lib Dem targets, the Labour vote is generally low, implying only a small increase in the Lib Dem vote, and no decrease in the Tory vote. Hence only a small swing to the Lib Dems.
So even if the Lib Dems are firmly in second place, they may find it difficult to get above 100 MPs…
Mark Posted 28th April 2010 at 1:33 am
It is a new system
Felix Holt Posted 28th April 2010 at 2:24 am
MPs each have a machine readable swipe card – makes recording all the voting details easy.
Each constituency would elect its own MP. Each Party would win its fair share of Parliamentary votes (proportional to the votes cast in the election) Each Party’s parliamentary votes are shared out amongst the party’s MPs.
Andrew Suffield Posted 28th April 2010 at 4:44 am
DPR Voting elects an MP who represents everyone in the constituency. Note that whichever candidate you vote for in the election has no effect on any of the parties. You don’t vote for the party candidate you vote for the best candidate to represent the constituency. Did you read Andreas Whittam Smith in The Independent on May 6?
In the Party vote, your vote and every vote makes a difference. No votes are discarded.
You have underestimated DPR Voting.