Noise of the Crowd

Two weeks ago, Labour’s lead over the Tories fell several points over a weekend. It’s still big enough to give Labour a decent majority, but it’s the first sustained shift of this size since the Tories’ omnishambles last spring.

There’s been some speculation about why the polls changed. Was it because Thatcher’s death reminded a bunch of people that they loved the Tories after all; because the welfare debate hurt Labour; because Tony Blair was nasty about Ed Miliband in the New Statesman; or was it the belated unwinding of the gains that Labour made in 2012?

The reason the question of why it happened is important* is that some changes are only temporary – usually when there’s been an external news story or a well-received political setpiece. But politics news that says something new and fundamental about one party can produce a more lasting realignment. This is what happened after the omnishambles budget – and it’s what some are saying is happening to Labour with the welfare debate (in a bad way).

Firstly, on the headline numbers, there was a drop in Labour’s lead between the 12^th and 15^th April. Excluding a couple of outliers**, Labour went from 11.4 ahead in the YouGov*** polls before that weekend to 7.5 in the polls since then.  While Lib Dem and UKIP scores haven’t changed much, the Tories have gone up a couple of points and Labour have fallen about the same amount:

The detail of who has switched might give us a clue about why things have changed.

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I wrote a post last year about old opinion polls and how well they predict future elections. It compared election results with polls taken 18 months after the previous election, and also compared polls taken two years before an election to the result of that election.

It’s now coming up to two years before the next election and the second part of my post has got a bit of attention.

John Rentoul in the Independent on Sunday argued that this kind of analysis is all well and good but we shouldn’t pay too much attention to where the polls are at the moment – there are too many unpredictable events that will change things over the next two years, and what matters is how the parties respond to them.

On Labour Uncut, Rob Marchant focused on the implications of the “two years before the next election” chart (below) and concluded that Labour is on the border between being on course to win in 2015 or not.

The “two years out” data do suggest, as Marchant says, that Labour’s current 11pt lead is about on the cusp of where an opposition needs to be if it’s to have most votes at the election. Only once – ’64 – has an opposition won when it’s been ahead by less than 10pts at this time.

But Rentoul is right that current polls can only take us so far: indeed the regression showed a 40% correlation, not a perfect prediction.  Events, and the parties’ reactions to them – politics – will do most of the shaping of what happens, and whether Labour’s lead goes up or down.

This is probably about as far as we can get looking just at overall national voting intent and past elections. But we can learn more by digging a bit deeper into where Labour’s lead came from.

About 15% of Labour’s current support is from people who voted Lib Dem in 2010*. It was their move to Labour in late 2010 that gave Labour a polling lead which it has kept pretty much consistently (except a brief period in early 2012). The fact these voters have largely stayed with Labour for two years suggests their support is fairly stable. But who knows what they will do when the Lib Dems start stepping up an election campaign, or if Clegg is dropped and the Lib Dems start trying to present a clean slate.

And it’s important to think about how this Lib Dem defection will work at the constituency level. Several people have written about this, but for me this piece by Mark Gettleson nails it. There are 33 seats where the Tory majority over Labour is less than the proportion of the vote that moved from Labour to the Lib Dems between ’97 and ’10. If these move back (though in 18 years there’s a lot of churn in a constituency), Labour would gain those seats directly from the Tories. (There are of course also seats, balancing this, that the Tories will be trying to take off the Lib Dems – 20 of their 40 targets)

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Through 2012, I kept track of five questions on the issues shaping UK politics. For a final time, I’m revisiting them to see how they’ve changed and where we are now:

1) More attention to growth

Until the omnishambles Budget, the country was pretty evenly split on whether the government should slow deficit reduction to concentrate on growth.

After the Budget, ‘concentrate on growth’ opened a lead that stayed above 6pts, and reached 17pts after dire economic figures in the summer.  But in the poll conducted immediately after the Autumn Statement, views were back to being evenly split.

Not only is this important for debates about the future of the economy, but it also says something interesting about the public’s relationship with political news. I’m often quite an exponent of the view “the politerati are talking to themselves, the rest of the country couldn’t give a stuff”. But the shifts in attitudes after the Budget and the Autumn Statement are a reminder that some political news does get widespread attention and change attitudes.

 More on this question here

2) Speed of cuts 

After holding steady for most of the year, the proportion saying the cuts are being made too quickly has now fallen a bit further, to 44%.

Clearly this isn’t good for the credibility of Labour’s line “too far, too fast”. This will be an interesting one to keep watching when more cuts start to bite. For example will personal experience of cuts to child benefits and the 1% cap start affecting views of cuts in general?

3) Blame for the cuts 

This is another one that hasn’t moved far in Labour’s direction. Over 2012, the proportion blaming Labour for the cuts fell from 39% to 36%: hardly a radical shift.

At the same time though, the coalition have started picking up a bit more of the blame: up from 22% in January to 27% at the end of the year.

But this still means that two and half years into the government, more people blame Labour for the cuts than the current government.

More on this question here

4) Old and tired 

But underneath the economic questions, there’s a host of measures about how the parties are viewed. One of the important ones is about whether they’re seen as old and tired.

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Sometimes, people living and breathing politics get swept away with how overwhelmingly important their work is. They’re battling for the future of the country, so everyone else must be hanging off their every action.

It’s true that big political stories that say something important about one side or the other – like the bungled Budget – can cut through and change people’s minds. Repeated little things – like Cameron’s modernisation – can do the same if there’s enough pushing in the same direction. (But it takes a lot of little things: from polling questions about recall of news stories, a good rule of thumb is, “when you’ve said something so much you’re getting sick of it, the public will be just beginning to hear”)

But as anyone who pays attention to polls knows, most people, most of the time, don’t care what politicians are doing. Sometimes the politerati are so isolated from the rest of the country, they’re effectively speaking a different language.

This was brilliantly exemplified in my favourite poll question of the year – one that received far less attention than it deserves.

The question focuses on the word ‘progressive’. It’s a tough word to define in its current political usage, not least as Cameron’s adoption of the term means it can no longer be treated as code for being centre-left.

But it’s fair to say that it is generally used to indicate a desire for reform of public institutions, the removal of barriers to social mobility and an end to discrimination against minorities. It’s not as statist as the old left, nor as resistant to change as traditional conservatism.

So according to this definition a progressive politician is someone within touching distance of the political centre – neither a radical leftie nor a bastion of old institutions, nor indeed a rampant free-marketeer.

But ask the public who they think is progressive and we get a very different answer. Of the 13 people tested by YouGov, the most ‘progressive’ is Sir Richard Branson. More than twice as many think the Queen is progressive than that Nick Clegg is!

What’s going on is that most people are treating ‘progressive’ as a general positive term – perhaps in the sense of ‘takes things in the right direction’. Comparing favourability scores with progressiveness scores shows the two are closely linked: 79% of the progressiveness score is explained by the favourability score.

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In the TV show The West Wing, the deputy chief of staff Josh Lyman once said, “I make it a point never to disagree with Labour blogger Hopi Sen when he’s right, Mr President.” (I may have paraphrased).

While I probably should never ignore such sage advice, this time I do disagree with Hopi. In particular I disagree with his assertion that the Lib Dems absolutely have to get rid of Nick Clegg because, as he puts it:

“PEOPLE HATE NICK CLEGG.

REALLY HATE HIM.

REALLY. REALLY. HATE. HIM.

They are not kidding about this and are not going to change their minds.”

But I think Hopi – and everyone else who makes the same point – are misdiagnosing the problem for Nick Clegg. Because the polls suggest, as politicians go, he really isn’t particularly unpopular.

According to Lord Ashcroft’s May poll (which I use as it has a huge base size), Clegg’s average score, in terms of “how positively or negatively” people feel, on a scale of -100 to +100, is -11.7. This is slightly worse than Cameron’s -1.7 and Miliband’s -2.4, but is roughly on a par with -15.8 for Osborne and -10.6 for Balls.

So on average, Clegg is relatively low though not bottom. But this doesn’t tell us about the spread of opinions.

If Hopi’s right that a meaningful number of people really (really) hate Clegg, we should see a high number giving him extremely negative scores – but we don’t. The proportion that give him scores in the bottom 10% (-80 or below) is pretty much the same as for Cameron and Miliband:

What’s more, the people who give him such negative scores are far more likely to be 2010 Labour voters than 2010 Lib Dem voters: compared with the 31% of 2010 Labour voters who rate Clegg so badly, only 13% of 2010 Lib Dem voters give him such low scores.

Comparing the 13% of 2010 Lib Dem voters who give him such a low score with the 2% of current Lib Dem voters who do the same, we can work out that, among those who voted Lib Dem in 2010 but now wouldn’t do so, about 22% give Nick Clegg a score of -80 of below. So even among current Labour voters and defecting Lib Dem voters (which are overlapping groups), less than a third appear to really dislike Clegg.

It’s far from a good performance, but not in itself a sign that Clegg couldn’t do all right in an election again.

So if he isn’t hated, what’s the issue for Clegg? There clearly is a problem that needs explaining given 76% of people think he’s doing badly.

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George Osborne’s 2012 budget changed the political landscape. Following a winter where the polls had narrowed to parity, Labour started consistently showing double-digit leads within a week of the budget.

At the time I wasn’t alone in arguing that, while Labour’s lead looked impressive, it was precarious. The evidence I cited included that Labour still didn’t have a lead on being best to handle the economy, and indeed had gained no support at all on this, only benefiting from a fall in belief in the Tories’ economic competence.

But five months later, and on the eve of party conferences, Labour’s lead is still pretty much exactly where it was a week after the budget: around ten points. So was I wrong that the lead was so fragile?

I don’t think so, though while it may still be vulnerable, the longer it lasts the more Labour are able to benefit from being ahead.

The questions I looked at in May still show almost exactly the same results. In particular, the question that asks, essentially: “Now think seriously. Which party do you actually want running the country?” shows that Labour and the Tories are still pretty much tied. Labour only pull ahead if you include those who’d prefer a coalition with the Lib Dems; given Lab-Lib’s lead over Con-Lib, tactical voting could benefit Labour:

One place where there’s been a little movement is in the question about which party “is led by people of real ability”. In the four polls after the budget, the Tories had a lead of four points. That’s now narrowed down to just one point. Both, though, are dwarfed by the 47% who say ‘None’:

But the stability of Labour’s lead is still important. Firstly, it suggests that people who came over to Labour in the spring weren’t just temporary visitors. Even over the Olympic summer, with an absence of political news, they have stayed with Labour rather than drifting away. The assumption now has to be that they will continue to support Labour unless persuaded to leave.

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ConservativeHome has stuck its neck out with an analysis of voting preferences for the November elections for Police and Crime Commissioners. Based on work by the Police Foundation, the article suggests that “even on the current discouraging opinion poll trends the Conservatives would end up winning the election of 21 commissioners against 20 for Labour”.

The claim has been picked up by the Guardian. But such a high figure seems like an odd sort of reverse expectation management on the part of ConservativeHome – as if they have some anti-Cameron agenda.

The first reason why the figure of 21 Tory Commissioners seems too high is that it is based on out-dated opinion poll data. Through no fault other than bad luck, the Police Foundation used data from February, when Labour’s average lead over the Tories was 1.5pts; the current UK Polling Report lead for Labour is 10pts.

Given that Labour’s support, absolutely and relative to the Tories, is now several points higher than it was when the Police Foundation did their analysis, some of the marginals might now go the other way. The tightest ones projected in the Tory column are Avon and Somerset, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire, and the same calculation, repeated now, might put all of these in Labour’s side, depending on exactly which polls are used.

I’m not sure whether ConservativeHome missed this or chose to ignore it, but the suggestion that the analysis incorporates “current” polling isn’t correct.

The second problem with the prediction of 21 Tory Commissioners is the unpredictability of the election.

Turnout is one issue. Of course it will be low, but at the moment there’s no way of knowing whether this will affect one side more than another.

There’s also the unpredictable impact of independent candidates. Plausible local campaigns could disrupt the Tory/Labour dominance, or they may just disappear without trace in an election that won’t get much national media coverage.

The other unpredictable factor, which could be crucial, is how voters will see the election.

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It’s said in consultancy, “a junior analyst needs three data points to call it a trend, a director needs two points for a trend, and a VP just needs one point”.

Whoever’s interpreting the data on the question of prioritising growth vs deficit reduction, it certainly now looks like a trend. For the third consecutive poll, the gap has increased in favour of concentrating on growth, “even if this means the deficit gets worse”.

It’s now at its widest point so far (17pts), with little more than a quarter saying the government should stick to its deficit-reduction strategy at the cost of slow growth:

If the government is to fight the next election with the argument that it’s been making tough but necessary decisions, it will have to reverse this trend.

See more about this question

Since the last election, a third of Tory voters have switched how they say they’d vote. While the current Tory voting intent is kept up a little by support gained from elsewhere, the permanent loss of so many of their 2010 voters would rule out any chance of the Tories being in the next government, let alone winning a majority.

But this is how things stand at the moment, and the election could still be almost three years away. New data from Lord Ashcroft suggest that the lost votes aren’t that far from the Tories’ reach.

On the question of where the 2010 Tory vote has gone, the single biggest group of defectors is those who say they don’t now know who they’d vote for. After that, UKIP have slightly more than Labour, with a small number saying they wouldn’t vote.

The table below shows the various pollsters’ latest scores for this. The results are pretty consistent across pollsters and some of the differences are explained by alternative weighting practices.

So excluding the don’t knows, the defectors have split fairly evenly between those who’ve gone to the right and those who’ve gone to the left of the Tories.

If this were to happen in a ballot (eg at the 2014 European elections), such a substantial boost for UKIP would destabilise the government, giving increasing ammunition to rebellious Tory backbenchers. Equally, defections of votes from the Tories directly to Labour count double in the parties’ head-to-head scores. So the table spells very bad news for the Tories.

But the new data from Ashcroft suggest that many of those voters may not yet have given up on the Tories. His poll looks specifically at those who voted Tory in 2010 and now would not, with a large enough base size to analyse them separately.

Despite no longer saying they would vote Tory, comfortable majorities of defectors still say they trust Cameron and Osborne more than Miliband and Balls to run the economy (76% vs 24%), and most think that Cameron would make the best PM (69% vs 21% for Miliband and 10% for Clegg). Of course this isn’t altogether surprising since we’ve seen that only about 17% of the defectors would go to one of the other main parties.

This touches on the main problem with giving too much weight to voting intent questions at the moment, years away from an election. They ask people which party they currently favour, not which party they actually want to run the country.

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On New Year’s Day, I wrote about five trends, where public opinion last year shifted on issues that could change the political landscape.

It’s time now to revisit those questions to see where we are, half-way through the year.

1) More attention to growth

The international debate of the last few years has been about whether governments should prioritise deficit reduction or growth.

In the first few months of 2012, the deficit hawks were winning in the UK. But after the Budget, that lead was reversed, and since late April there was been a 6-11pt lead for those who say the government should prioritise growth.

See more on this question here

2) Speed of the cuts

Labour’s central criticism of the government’s economic programme is that the cuts are not only going too far, but also are too fast. Over 2011, the proportion who agreed that the government was cutting too quickly fell from 58% to 48%, suggesting trouble for Labour.

But this year, that trend has stopped. The proportion saying the cuts are too fast is about the same now as it was in autumn 2011.

3) Blame for the cuts

Views on who is to blame for the cuts showed little movement in 2011, with about 15pts more blaming Labour than the coalition.

This changed after the budget, when the gap fell to single figures. Since then, it has been between 5-10pts.

It’s interesting that the government appears now to be returning to the argument that they’re clearing up Labour’s mess, presumably in anticipation of making this central to their next election campaign. If so, this question will be increasingly important.

See more on this question here

4) An old and tired party

Last year, the question of which party was most seen as ‘old and tired’ moved (in Labour’s favour), when voting intention didn’t change.

Now, Labour have established a lead on being seen as less ‘old and tired’ for the first time since the election. Unlike voting intent, this view has strengthened in Labour’s favour over the last two months, with Labour now having a nine-point lead.

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