Post-budget polling

There were three immediate post-budget polls on the day of the budget from Opinium, SavantaComRes and YouGov. They all showed very high levels of approval – YouGov found 46% support, 11% opposed; Opinium found 52% approve, 12% disapprove; SavantaComRes found 60% satisfied and 11% dissatisfied. The following day YouGov also put out new voting intention figures, which showed a Conservative lead of 13 points. While the Conservative lead has been steadily growing over recent weeks anyway, at least part of that looks likely to be a bounce from a positively received budget. Worth remembering that it was conducted immediately after the budget, before the press coverage turned rather less positive…

NHS Salaries

This would not be the first initially popular budget to come unstuck in the following days as people look in more detail at the details. In this case the downside doesn’t appear to be in the details of the budget itself, but in the proposed NHS pay settlement that was announced the following day. The first actual polling on this has come from Opinium in the Observer. This found 24% thought the proposed pay rise was too high or about right, 72% thought it was too low.

While high, this is by no means new, or different, or surprising. All past polling on nurses salaries has always shown the vast majority of people support increases – look, for example, here or here or here or here or here or here. That’s about a minute of googling. The public have very consistently and very widely supported increasing nurses’ pay for many years. It has not led to large rises, or prevented the Conservative party winning elections in their absence. A better question is perhaps to what degree it is a more salient issue given the coronavirus, and whether it actually damages Conservative support. Time will tell if that’s the case.

All past polling has shown that nurses are held in extremely high public regard (look, for example, at the Ipsos MORI veracity index). In terms of public sympathy, this is a fight that is probably unwinnable for the Government. The question is more weather they knuckle down and accept any hit to public support (because something is unpopular it does not necessarily damage support at the ballot box), or whether they U-turn on it.

Scotland

There are two Scottish polls in the Sunday papers, one from SavantaComRes for the Scotsman on Sunday, one from Panelbase for the Sunday Times.

The Scotsman on Sunday one makes great play of No being ahead in their SavantaComRes poll – 46% No, 43% Yes, Don’t know 10%.

This has been rather complicated however by methodological issues. Previous ComRes polls on Scottish Independence have been weighted by likelihood to vote. This one was not, meaning it can’t be easily compared to the previous figures. More to the point, the impact of weighting by likelihood to vote has sometimes been quite large in previous ComRes polls, so it’s quite hard to work out what the impact would have been.

In ComRes’s last Scottish poll, conducted in late February for ITN, applying turnout weighting had minimal effect. However, in their last poll for the Scotsman at the start of Feb 2021 it made a huge impact, transforming a 3 point No lead to a 5 point Yes lead. In other words, it’s quite possible that if the same turnout filter had been used this wouldn’t have shown any change in support for Independence at all.

The Scotsman on Sunday article also reports people claiming that the Salmond Inquiry makes them less likely to support Independence. I’d take that with a bucket of salt. I’ve written before about the perils of “does X make you more or less likely to vote Y” questions. They are tricky to ask, as committed supporters of something tend to pick “more likely” as the most supportive option (even if their opinion is completely unchanged), and the same for committed opponents. This means you get odd results like 16% saying Alex Salmond & Nicola Surgeon calling each other liars makes them support independence more*. Really, it is just committed supporters of independence saying they still support independence, and the claimed percentage saying it makes them less supportive of independence will include a lot of people who were concrete opponents of independence anyway.

The way to see if an event has actually changed the level of support for independence is to ask about support for independence and compare it to a poll conducted before the event. It does require you to ask it in a comparable manner though, rather than buggering about with the turnout filter.

The Panelbase poll does at least do that. They found topline figures of YES 46%(-3), NO 47%(+3). Changes are from their previous poll in January. The No lead is pretty much an artefact of the rounding – according to John Curtice who has written them up in the Sunday Times, without don’t knows it ends up as a 50/50 split. It is, as ever, just one poll, but does suggest some damage from the Salmond-Sturgeon row. One should again consider the context of the polling – just as the YouGov voting intention poll at the top of this post was conducted in the midst of extremely positive coverage about the budget, this poll was conducted in the midst of the SNP having a huge row between its current and former leaders. In both cases one should probably wait for things to calm down before assuming any long term impact.

(*As an aside, the best example of the useless of more/less likely to vote questions I’ve ever come across is this one from the US Alabama Senate election in 2017. The Republican candidate faced several accusations of sexually assaulting underage girls. A question asked in that same “more or less likely to vote” format found 36% of people were less likely to vote for him because of these accusations, and 28% were MORE likely. Either 28% of people were genuinely more likely to vote for a candidate because he’d been accused of molesting schoolgirls… or perhaps questions like that don’t really show what they appear to show.)

Yesterday Channel 4 news and JLPartners released an interesting poll of so-called “red wall” seats. A lot of things get written about “Red Wall seats” that don’t necessarily have much thought behind them. It is the Essex man or Worcester woman of the 2019 election, an easy buzzword that is too often a substitute for proper understanding. They are important, but you need to look careful at the nuances.

Let us start by going back to where the term originated, with James Kanagasooriam. It wasn’t just a generic word for northern marginals or Tory targets – James coined it when talking about as seats that demographically should have been Conservative, but which consistently voted Labour. James actually identified several groups of these seats – some in Wales, some in County Durham, and a big swathe of them across urban Lancashire and Yorkshire that looked like a red wall. Hence the name.

The whole point of James’ argument was that there were seats that in terms of their make up (class, economy, education, age structure and so on) you would expect to vote Conservative, but that they actually voted Labour because of a cultural, historical and social hostility towards the Tories. These weren’t seats full of horny-handed sons of toil, they were seats that were or had become more affluent but yet not become Tory. Sefton, for example, is largely affluent suburbia, with some of the highest home-ownership rates in the country. Yet it votes Labour, because it’s Liverpool’s suburbs, and people in Liverpool are not inclined to go about voting Conservative.

One can debate the reasons for this dislike, but the most obvious explanations are historical: the identity as former mining communities, the legacy and memory of Thatcherism and the dismantling of industry in the North in the 1980s. The point was, this was an obstacle to the Tories – how to appeal to these people who “should” demographically be their target audience, but for whatever reason were not interested.

Skipping ahead, we know that the Conservatives did manage to do this in many areas in 2017 and 2019. In fact in many of these areas there has been an incredible sea-change in voting behavior. Across the two elections the Conservatives have made gains there that would have looked unbelievable ten years ago. In 2015, the Conservatives won the national share of the vote by 7%. In 2019 they won by 12%, that is, a 2.5% swing across those two elections. Compare that to the Lab=>Con swing in some of the “red wall” seats. Sedgefield experienced a 14% swing across the two elections, Blyth Valley 13%, Bolsover 19%, Leigh 18%.

While there are some areas that did not follow this tide (Merseyside in particular is still extremely unforgiving territory for the Conservative party), among other areas in Lancashire, Country Durham, and Derbyshire mining areas the “red wall” decisively crumbled.

There are different explanations one can come up with for what happened. Part of it was probably the disruptive effect Brexit had upon traditional party ties, part of it perhaps a general change to the way the Conservative party has presented itself and its message. Much will simply be to the passage of time – those old mining identities can only sustain for so long once the mines have closed, the miners have passed on, the old sites regenerated and replaced by new build housing estates.

However, the Tory advances of 2017 and 2019 were not just in James’s red wall seats. Here is where it gets complicated, and why one should be cautious about throwing all those 2019 gains in together. The Conservatives gained other seats as well, some of which don’t match this description at all. Lewis Baston has written about this well previously. Some of them were in perennial marginals – places like Darlington, Stockton South, Keighley or Lincoln that have been competitive for decades and just happen to be in the North or the Midlands. If you are looking at opinion in the “red wall seats”, you have to be careful how you define it, and what you are actually looking at.

All that brings me round to the actual JLpartners/Channel 4 polling. This polled 500 people in the seats that the Conservatives won from Labour in the North & Midlands in 2019. The write up and full tables are here (do go and have a read, as there is lots of detail I have not explored below).

Overall the poll shows Labour at 47%, the Conservatives at 41%. In comparison, in the same seats the vote share in 2019 was Conservative 48%, Labour 39%. That translates into a swing of 7.5% from Conservative to Labour. In comparison the national polls conducted over the same period showed on average a Conservative lead of 1 point, a swing of 5.5% from Conservative to Labour.

On the face of it, that suggests the Conservatives are doing marginally worse in these seats than in the country as a whole. If that was to happen at an election it would be unusual – parties actually tend to do a bit better than average in seats they gained at the previous election because they have gained the incumbency advantage (the MP’s “personal vote”), and their opponents have lost it, so this would be a particularly poor performance. However, I should add the caveat that it’s just one poll of 500 people, so there is a margin of error of 4% on there. We should not put too much confidence on whether the Conservatives are doing a couple of percentage points better or worse in an area based on a single poll.

More interesting of course would be to be able to look under the bonnet at the different types of seat within those we’ve lumped together as “red wall” seats. Are there different patterns at work in those traditional marginal seats to those former mining and industrial seats that have been part of the bigger red-wall sea-change. There is no particular reason to think that seats like Lincoln or Blackpool South or Gedling would behave any differently to marginal seats elsewhere – but for seats like Sedgefield, Bassetlaw or Bolsover there’s a question of whether the political re-alignment we’ve seen over the last few elections has come to a halt or is still ongoing.

That’s not to say the JLPartners/Channel 4 poll isn’t good stuff – it is – it’s more than it’s only a starting point.

The question people tend to ask on the back of polls like this is whether the Tories need to worry unduly about keeping these seats in their column, and whether Labour can win them back. In that context, it is probably too simplistic to look at them as a single lump. In one sense, obviously these seats will be part of the battleground – but that’s just a truism. These are marginal seats, elections will be always be won and lost in the marginal seats. The more important question is whether these marginal seats are the ones that are most likely to change at the next election, or whether by looking at the fashionable “red wall” seats we miss looking at potentially more vulnerable seats elsewhere?

It may be that the political re-alignment in the true “red wall” seats is so seismic that they actually become safer Tory seats than some of the more traditional marginals. It may be that the more vulnerable Tory seats next time round are actually some more affluent seats with high proportions of graduates. The pattern of key marginals next time round could be those that are similar to North West Bristol or Canterbury, rather than winning back old mining seats.

Northern Tory gains last time weren’t monolithic – it isn’t one single “red wall” – they mix up some traditional marginals, as well as some sea that have seen truly transformational change. We shouldn’t assume they’ll behave as one block, or in the same way in the future either. Equally, we shouldn’t necessarily assume that all the interesting changes at the next election will happen in the same place as the last one. There are risks and opportunities elsewhere too.

I’ve written over the YouGov website about the latest YouGov polling on how the government are handling the corona outbreak here.

Polls across the board show that the public have a generally negative attitude towards how the government are handling the outbreak. The attempt here is to look under the bonnet a bit about why, and which parts. In that sense people seem to rate the government’s handling of the coronavirus in economic terms seems to be a little better than perceptions of how they are combating the virus itself. However, the very lowest results are on perceptions of the level of organisation – just 20% think they appear to be in charge of the situation, only 17% think they have a clear plan.

Full article is here.