Snap polls: week 5
A series of mini-blogs covering public opinion, polling and GE 2024
It’s been a week of continued chat about the potential eye-watering scale of the Conservative defeat. It has featured several more dubious claims and counter claims, adding to the £2k on tax with £4k on mortgages and Britain having more potholes than there are craters on the moon.
Not so super majority
Manifesto week the previous week was followed by MRP week. The Ipsos MRP, uniquely based on an online panel benefiting from a random probability selection methodology, was published on Tuesday 18th. This was followed by not one but three others on the 19th, and there will surely be more.
MRP is the new kid on the polling block. It’s so new that I’m not yet aware of a collective pronoun for this method which, essentially, converts large sample national polls into seat projections.
Removal of reliance on the deeply unsatisfactory national uniform swing as the basis for converting party shares into seats, takes away a key source of doubt. However, we shouldn’t neglect to consider the statistical health warnings and margins of error involved. For example, Ipsos’ model identified 117 seats “too close to call” with a lead of less than five percentage points. As a result, “small changes in the parties’ performance could still lead to big changes in the final outcome.”
Meanwhile, conventional polls show that two-thirds of people, 66%, expect Labour to form the next government. According to Ipsos (14–17 June), 31% believe that a Labour majority of 151 to 200 seats or more would be a bad outcome for the country, although a slightly larger proportion, 36% say it would be good.
The future now
It has been a feature of this election campaign that coverage has tended to focus not on who will win, but the size of that victory. Some say that Labour’s large poll lead and ‘safe’ campaign tactic — described by some critics as “reckless caution” — could be storing up trouble for new Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Starmer will face a very challenging first few months of government as several realities, especially fiscal ones, smack hard against public priorities and expectations. There are though two things we should remember.
First, things always take time. While Tony Blair enjoyed sky-high personal ratings, voters remained sceptical of New Labour progress on its four principal pledges for several years after its election.
Second, a majority of voters expect tax rises following the upcoming election, no matter which party wins.
The battle for the heart and soul of the Conservative party has also permeated the election campaign (perhaps even more so behind the scenes). Last week, academic Tim Bale — an expert on the party — described a ‘landside defeat as creating a parliamentary party, “more southern, more nimbyish, more Oxbridge educated...”
And Reform’s Nigel Farage has said that the is looking at the 2029 election after he has become the real “leader of the opposition”. Reform has quickly moved from nothing to something in the blink of an eye. Ipsos has shown Farage’s appeal to 2019 Conservative voters who are just as likely to prefer him as Prime Minister as Rishi Sunak.
Even if they only wins a few seats, Reform’s national share could “unlock a stream of public funding of hundreds of thousands of pounds.”
Hotting up, cooling down?
There can be few, if any, more ‘wicked’ policy problems deserving of our attention than climate change. But it is as low as thirteenth in Ipsos’ list of issues that voters are saying matters to them at the election. It is though higher among younger and middle age groups, and this is in part because politicians have not sought to boost its salience.
While most net zero policies continue to enjoy majority support among Britons, support has fallen.
Concern about climate change has softened too, but this shouldn’t be overstated. According to Ipsos, in 77% of voters were extremely, very, and fairly worried about climate change Spring 2024. This was five points lower than it was in October 2022, but in absolute terms, sentiment is steadfast behind the imperative to tackle climate change with a preference for strong action.
Just as there is a risk of ‘greenwashing’, there is a tendency to see public opinion on climate change in very binary terms. We need to do better.
