Tag Archives: Polls

Mary Reid

Up and down

By Mary Reid | Thu 15th July 2021 - 12:13 pm

At Lib Dem Voice we don’t usually cover the results of political polls, because they do fluctuate. Also, paying too much attention to poll results can have unintended consequences for our party’s campaigning. Liberal Democrats were riding high in the polls during the last elections to the European Parliament in 2019, and some people imagined that we could win a swathe of seats in the General Election later that year simply based on the polling data. Seasoned campaigners, however, know that we only win seats if we do a lot of work on the ground – the support shown in polls is never enough.

But we have to admit that it is exciting when our poll position makes a substantial leap from 6% to 13%. The Evening Standard  reports an Ipsos-Mori poll which shows that support for both Labour and the Conservatives has fallen by 4 points since their last poll. The Conservatives are still 9 points ahead, but net satisfaction of Boris Johnson and the Government have fallen to and -16 and -20 respectively. But the Liberal Democrats have jumped to 13%, and this is the first time we have been at that level since the 2019 General Election.

So what do we make of it? Undoubtedly our win in Chesham and Amersham produced this bounce. The party cleverly exploited the publicity immediately afterwards. The image of Ed Davey knocking down the blue wall with a small yellow mallet visually encapsulated our key message to the whole country very neatly – those who criticised it as a stunt clearly don’t understand how the media works.

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The Voice

Three poll boosts for Lib Dem candidates

By The Voice | Fri 8th November 2019 - 10:25 am

Three constituency election polls put Lib Dems in touching distance of taking Dominic Raab’s Esher and Walton seat. This is great news for Lib Dem candidate Monica Harding.

The polling work was done before the announcement that Esher and Walton was part of the Unite to Remain arrangement.

Another poll put is on course to win South Cambridgeshire where Ian Sollom is our candidate

And with just under 5 weeks to go, Dr Phillip Lee is only 4 points behind John Redwood in Wokingham.

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Caron Lindsay

Labour’s own polling suggests losses in London and wipeout in Scotland

By Caron Lindsay | Tue 24th September 2019 - 7:45 am

I think the Lib Dems need to declare the cost of staging Labour Conference as an election expense

So said a Labour friend of mine on Twitter in deep frustration at his party’s failure to unequivocally back Remain in chaotic scenes yesterday.

I genuinely feel for my friends in Labour who are horrified at what their party is doing. Some, like Alastair Campbell, voted Lib Dem in the European elections. I hope that they will feel able to do so at the forthcoming General Election, even  if they don’t want to say so out loud.

When a party gets it as badly wrong on the major issue of the day, the chances are that it will be punished at the ballot box and two reports suggest that this is exactly the fate awaiting Labour candidates.

And what is more bizarre is that it’s Labour’s own internal polling that is predicting the disaster.

The Scotsman reports that we and the SNP will be the beneficiaries of a Labour wipeout in Scotland:

Across the UK, only 58.7 per cent of 2017 Labour voters would stick with the party under those circumstances. The Lib Dems would take 19 per cent of the 2017 Labour vote, with 7.4 per cent going to the Greens, 3.5 per cent to the SNP, and 0.7 per cent to Plaid Cymru.

The figures are even worse in Scotland, where just 49.2 per cent of 2017 Labour voters would stick with the party. The SNP would take a fifth of Labour’s vote at the last election, with 15% going to the Lib Dems, 6% to the Brexit Party, and 3% to the Conservatives.

And the Evening Standard suggests that we will benefit from Labour’s losses in London:

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Caron Lindsay

Poll gives Remain a 10 point lead over Leave – what does this mean?

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 16th December 2017 - 10:27 pm

A BMG poll for the Independent shows a majority of those asked are now in favour of remaining in the European Union. In fact, Remain has a 10 point lead over leave which widens to 11% when you exclude the don’t knows:

When a weighted sample of some 1,400 people were asked: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union, or leave the European Union?” – 51 per cent backed Remain, and 41 per cent backed Leave.

7 per cent said “don’t know” and 1 per cent refused to answer.

After “don’t knows” were either pushed for an answer or otherwise excluded, 55.5 per cent backed Remain and 44.5 backed Leave.

Polling since this time last year appears to demonstrate a clear trend; Leave enjoyed a lead last December which gradually shrank, before turning into a lead for Remain in the month of the general election, that has since grown.

So by the time the Government drags us out of the EU, it is likely that a majority of people will be in favour of staying. How can that possibly be legitimate?

This poll does come with a bit of a health warning. The fieldwork was carried out during that week where the deal over the Irish situation was unravelling in slow motion in front of our eyes. However, the deal that was reached on 8th December, the final day of the fieldwork, is simply a bit of fudge covered with sticking plaster resolving none of the key issues. Those problems will loom large in the early months of 2018.

What if the polls turned? Surely the Government would be compelled to test whether their deal has public sympathy.

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Caron Lindsay

Encouraging poll news for the Liberal Democrats

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 23rd April 2017 - 8:01 am

The first Scottish opinion polls since the General Election was announced have been published and there’s mixed news for the Liberal Democrats.

Panelbase has us on just 5% (but that’s still up since January) and Survation has us up 1 from the 2015 election at 9%. If we go up at the rate that we have done in every election other than 2015, we could be on for a fair few gains up here. Edinburgh West and North East Fife, both gained from the SNP at Holyrood last year are the top targets but seats like Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross and Charles Kennedy’s old seat of Ross, Skye and Lochaber are definitely in play. Winning back those highland heartlands from the SNP would be a marvellous thing and it is eminently doable.

On a UK level, we’ve gone up 4 points to 12% in a YouGov poll.

And there has been another important development:

UKIP are on the way down, and they certainly don’t seem to have learned any lessons about candidate approval, if one of their Glasgow council candidates is anything to go by. It’s quite something when being in favour of the guillotine and flogging are the mildest of your bizarre views. From the Herald:

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Caron Lindsay

THREE sensational by-election GAINS and a 4% poll bounce! Not a bad Thursday night!

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 16th December 2016 - 12:32 am

Every Thursday night now there’s a bit of a  weight of expectation now. We are winning so many by-elections that you just will the trend to continue and wonder if it can.

Tonight it did in pretty spectacular style. The night started sedately enough with Alaric Rose holding Exeter ward in Kidlington.

Then the big news from Blackdown in Somerset – in the heart of Taunton Deane, a seat won by the Conservatives in the General Election from us.

That is not a typo. That is a 49% increase in the vote.

But then the Blackdown Thunder was stolen with an even more remarkable result from Richard Keeling and team in the Chudleigh ward of Teinbridge District Council.

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Caron Lindsay

Ashcroft poll in Hallam: Clegg within a whisker of Labour with a lot of Tory vote to squeeze

By Caron Lindsay | Wed 29th April 2015 - 4:48 pm

Lord Ashcroft has released a last minute poll on Nick Clegg’s seat of Sheffield Hallam. It’s the third he has conducted in the last 5 months. It comes with all the usual caveats on Ashcroft polls – he doesn’t mention the candidates’ names, and he has some weird methodology that he doesn’t explain to us about how he gets his final figures.

The results last month showed Labour two points ahead on 36% with Nick on 34%. The new poll shows Labour just one point ahead on 37% and Nick on 36%. The Tories are on 15%, UKIP on 7% …

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Paul Walter

Champagne corks popping at party HQ?

By Paul Walter | Wed 5th November 2014 - 12:54 pm

Champagne cork popping photo by Brent SchneemanTim Farron was on Radio Four’s Today yesterday morning. He was talking about Norman Baker’s resignation. In passing, when interviewer John Humphrys mentioned the party potentially losing lots of MPs at the next election, Tim mentioned that the Lib Dems went up by three percentage points in this week’s Lord Ashcroft poll.

When Humphrys said he would mention that this was just one optimistic poll for the party amidst many pessimistic polls, Tim joked that “at party HQ they might not hear you above the sound of champagne corks popping”.

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Posted in Polls | Also tagged and | 15 Comments
Caron Lindsay

Voters give Liberal Democrats credit for tax threshold rise according to IPSOS-MORI poll

By Caron Lindsay | Sat 18th October 2014 - 12:25 pm

We all heard David Cameron and George Osborne take credit as often as they can for the raising of the tax threshold during this Parliament but a poll from IPSOS-MORI with fieldwork done after our Conference shows that the public just aren’t buying the Tory claims. 41% give the Liberal Democrats the credit for the policy compared to just 26% for the Conservatives as this graphic shows.

ISPOS-MORI tax threshold poll

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Caron Lindsay

Cool politicians poll showcases the paucity of political debate

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 13th July 2014 - 10:15 am

I thought we’d scraped the bottom of the barrel when these photos of poor Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich led to him being mocked in virtually every publication in the UK. But it gets worse. The other day I sighed when I saw the headline “Ed Miliband is less cool than Sir Menzies Campbell”. Apparently YouGov has been spending time and money asking people how cool a group of current and former party leaders are.

Unsurprisingly, nobody makes it out of the negatives:

You Gov Cool poll

 

It’s certainly true than …

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Stephen Tall

Mrs Thatcher’s impact: how the public sees it now, how LDV readers saw it in 2008

By Stephen Tall | Tue 9th April 2013 - 7:10 pm

The Guardian is the first off the blocks with an ICM poll asking the public’s retrospective verdict on Margaret Thatcher’s record in office. Here’s the topline figure of whether her 11-year premiership had been good or bad for Britain:

guardian icm thatcher

The paper also asked about specific policies, finding:

The sale of council homes and tackling of trade union power remain popular today, but people are less supportive of the fights she picked with Europe and tax cuts for the rich. Privatisation of the utilities and the poll tax remain deeply unpopular.

You can …

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Stephen Tall

So, about that Lib Dem wipeout in 2015 then…

By Stephen Tall | Wed 9th January 2013 - 7:45 am

GB-election-map2Ask most commentators about Lib Dem prospects at the next general election and a couple of words are sure to crop up sooner or later: either ‘wipeout’ or ‘annihilation’.

I understand why. Look at the opinion polls and the party is bobbing around the 10% mark. Compare that to the 23% we won in 2010, get your uniform national swing slide-rule out, and you can see why many folk, even quite sensible ones like Peter Kellner, will say something like this…

The Liberal Democrats are facing political extinction with

…

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 131 Comments
Lev Eakins

Opinion: “The Lib Dems will be crushed at the next election” – Busting the biggest lie in British politics

By Lev Eakins | Fri 5th October 2012 - 11:54 am

We’ve all seen poll after poll regularly showing a massive drop in support for our party since the general election – most have us on 8-12% (with the exception of ICM suggesting 14-15%). The president of YouGov claims 10% would reduce us from over 50 MPs to just 10 in 2015. Many of us (myself included) have accepted this as fact – it makes sense. It’s what the polls say. It’s true.

Except, it isn’t.

Last week I heard a new “Wisdom Index” ICM poll had us at 18% and I was stunned. Such levels of support have been unheard of …

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Stephen Tall

ConHome pushes case for Vince Cable as Lib Dem leader. It’s enough to make you wonder why…

By Stephen Tall | Sat 22nd September 2012 - 9:30 am

You’ve gotta love ConservativeHome. No, really. This morning Tim Montgomerie reports a deliciously mischief-making poll from YouGov, commissioned by the Lord Ashcroft-backed site, comparing the standing of Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and the Liberal Democrats in general.

It won’t surprise anyone to learn that Vince Cable performs better than Nick Clegg in all the measures of leadership qualities asked about. (You can see the results in the graph at the foot of this piece.) This leads Tim to conclude: ‘If the Liberal Democrats are looking for a leader who can increase their electoral competitiveness these are powerful numbers.’

Call me …

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Posted in Op-eds and Polls | Also tagged , , , and | 11 Comments
Stephen Tall

New poll finds 60% of public backs Lib Dem flagship policy of tax-cuts for low-paid funded by tax increases for wealthy

By Stephen Tall | Tue 28th February 2012 - 9:45 pm

It’s a month since Nick Clegg made a fresh bid to put the Lib Dems’ flagship 2010 manifesto policy once again front-and-centre: further tax-cuts for the lowest-paid to be funded by higher taxes for the wealthiest.

And today came news of what the public thinks of the Lib Dem approach to fairer taxes, with the Independent reporting the following ComRes poll results:

A majority of people want George Osborne to raise taxes for the rich in next month’s Budget in order to take more low paid workers out of tax, according to a ComRes survey for The Independent. Some

…

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Mark Pack

How the left/right balance of Liberal Democrat voters has changed

By Mark Pack | Wed 11th January 2012 - 10:25 am

It is common to use two political spectrums to sort out where people or parties sit ideologically: the left-right spectrum and the authoritarian-libertarian spectrum. The latter is important in explaining the politics of the coalition’s formation, as it was a defence of civil liberties against New Labour’s post-9/11 authoritarian streak that both saw senior figures in the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives often co-operating in Parliament and also carved out a large area of policy agreement between them.

Since the coalition’s formation, its importance has rapidly dropped. Some of the reasons are straightforwardly good ones – such as delivering on several of …

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Nick T

LibLink: Mark Pack – The Graph May Be Boring; The Political Message Isn’t

By Nick T | Sat 26th November 2011 - 1:58 pm

Over at the Huffington Post, the Voice’s Mark Pack has a post examining some interesting – and surprising – polling data, complete with a graph (don’t say Mark doesn’t spoil you).

Here’s Mark explaining what the graph shows:

It comes from polling carried out by MORI, asking the same question over the years: “How interested would you say you are in politics?” The graph shows how many people gave one of the two positive answers (“very” or “fairly”) – and so also shows how the public’s interest in politics has been pretty consistent, at a high level. (You can get the

…

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Stephen Tall

Pollwatch – State of the parties (summer 2010): Reasons to keep calm and carry on

By Stephen Tall | Sat 21st August 2010 - 5:57 pm

There have been a rather astonishing 36 opinion polls in the six weeks since LDV’s last polls round-up at the beginning of July. Thirty of those 36 originate from just one polling company, YouGov.

So let’s bring you up-to-date with July and August’s polls in chronological order of publication:

    Con 40, Lab 36, Lib Dem 16 (YouGov, 4-5 Jul)
    Con 41, Lab 36, Lib Dem 15 (YouGov, 5-6 Jul)
    Con 40, Lab 36, Lib Dem 17 (YouGov, 6-7 Jul)
    Con 42, Lab 35, Lib Dem 16 (YouGov, 7-8 Jul)
    Con 42, Lab 34, Lib Dem 17 (YouGov, 8-9 Jul)
    Con 42, Lab 35, Lib Dem

…

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Stephen Tall

100 Days: the Coalition is still enjoying a honeymoon

By Stephen Tall | Wed 18th August 2010 - 2:15 pm

Last month, YouGov’s Peter Kellner penned a rather premature post, which stated categorically: The honeymoon is over. I took him to task at the time, and stand by my view that the Coalition is still regarded generally favourably by a plurality of the public.

It’s been interesting, then, to read some of the barrage of opinion polling which has greeted the Coalition’s first 100 days. Perhaps most significant is this article in The Guardian – Coalition winning argument on economy – detailing ICM polling which shows 44% believe the coalition is doing a good job in securing economic …

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Stephen Tall

Huhne on Lib Dem poll ratings: “Frankly, it doesn’t worry me”

By Stephen Tall | Mon 2nd August 2010 - 9:40 am

We’re into August, the dead political season, so doubtless we can expect plenty more media stories about the collapse of the Lib Dem vote, the imminent collapse of the Coalition, the collapse of Nick Clegg’s ratings etc, etc.

The latest miniplosion of noise has been sparked by YouGov’s latest poll, showing the Lib Dems polling 12% (compared to the Tories’ 42% and Labour’s 38%). For some, strange reason the papers seem much keener to report this poll finding than they were to report ICM’s 19% rating for the party a few days ago. We’ll be looking back fully on July’s polls …

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Stephen Tall

Is the Coalition Government’s honeymoon really over?

By Stephen Tall | Tue 27th July 2010 - 7:25 pm

Forget the Lib Dems’ current poll-ratings for a moment – though today’s 19% from ICM will have done a fair amount to repair nerves frayed by YouGov’s poorer recent scores – and let’s focus on the Coalition Government as a whole.

Last week, YouGov’s Peter Kellner stated categorically: The honeymoon is over. His logic was simple enough:

Over the past four weeks, the coalition’s approval rating has slipped slowly but remorselessly. Our latest figures report a net rating of plus four (approve 41%, disapprove 37%). In just over two months, the coalition’s rating has declined to levels that were not

…

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Posted in News, Op-eds and Polls | Also tagged , , and | 39 Comments
Stephen Tall

Poll of teachers puts Lib Dems in third place at 14%

By Stephen Tall | Sat 16th January 2010 - 7:20 pm

Now LDV doesn’t, as our readers know, usually focus on individual opinion polls – but this one’s a little out of the ordinary, as it focuses on the voting intentions of teachers. The survey of nearly 4,000 teachers for the education charity the Sutton Trust by Ipsos MORI revealed the following voting intentions:

  • Labour 25%
  • Tories 18%
  • Lib Dems 14%

Here’s what the Independent had to say about the poll in relation to the Lib Dems:

Today’s poll showed the Liberal Democrats lagging behind the two main parties with just 14 per cent. Traditionally, third parties have done well in polls

…

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Posted in Polls | Also tagged | 16 Comments
Stephen Tall

Official: Lib Dems the winners in 2009 local by-elections

By Stephen Tall | Wed 23rd December 2009 - 3:45 pm

There’s been a fair degree of criticism of the Lib Dems’ parliamentary by-election performances in the last couple of years: the 2006 ‘glory days’ of beating Labour in Dunfermline, and coming oh-so-close against the Tories in Bromley have seemed an increasingly distant memory. So, let’s celebrate an arena where the party is doing well: local government by-elections. And not merely doing well: in fact, doing better than the other two major parties.

(Hat-tips to John’s Liberal Revolution blog and to middle englander on the Vote 2007 website).

Here are the summary results of the 280 by-elections held during 2009:

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Posted in Local government and Polls | Also tagged , and | 2 Comments
Stephen Tall

Daily View: 14 December 2009

By Stephen Tall | Mon 14th December 2009 - 9:30 am

Mornin’ all, welcome to Monday, and to the beginning of the last full working week before Christmas. What other things happened on this day in history, you ask? Well, 54 years ago, Hugh Gaitskell was elected leader of the Labour party, succeeding Clement Attlee, and six years ago Saddam Hussein was captured. But enough of the past, and on to the present …

2 Must-Read Blog-Posts

A couple of weeks ago, Iain Dale was casually dismissing the revelations that trustafarian Tory millionaire candidate Zac Goldsmith has been avoiding tax by registering for non-dom status: “lots of sanctimonious guff,” he told …

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Stephen Tall

Saint Vince, the canonisation continues …

By Stephen Tall | Wed 16th September 2009 - 8:15 pm

Yesterday saw the launch of Vince Cable’s and the Lib Dems’ plans for tackling the fiscal crisis, widely praised by commentators (though perhaps less so in Wales).

Today it’s not just the Guardian which is singing Vince’s praises, the Economist’s Bagehot is also writing In praise of Vince:

The real winner of today’s fiscal tussle, however, was Vince Cable.

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