Tories unchanged/Labour up 1/LDs down 2

After all the excitement of the recent MORI and Angus Reid polls tonight’s telephone poll from ComRes shows very little change on the last phone poll from the firm for which the fieldwork finished on January 9th 2011. The changes on that are CON nc: LAB +1: LD -2 The direction, to Labour, is consistent with other surveys.

ComRes operates in two entirely different ways – it’s continuing to use its conventional telephone polling with some surveys and since last autumn it is also doing online surveys. These are, in fact, two different polling series and should be regarded as such.

In its non-VI question the pollsters found, unsurprisingly, that 94% of people thought it wrong to hack the private telephone voicemail messages of celebrities and 92% thought the same about politicians.

Two in three people believe the allegations about hacking show that the newspaper industry should no longer be allowed to regulate itself. And the same proportion think that David Cameron showed poor judgement in employing Andy Coulson as the Downing Street director of communications because he had already had to resign as editor of the News of the World over the hacking scandal.

So overall – not very exciting.

Update: Tonight’s YouGov daily poll for News International has CON 40: LAB 42: LD 8

Mike Smithson

Should the lead be 10 percent plus?

The president of YouGov and well-known Labour supporter, Peter Kellner, has put the cat amongst the pigeons with an article this afternoon saying that his party should be doing substantially better in the polls.

He points to the current 32% – 54% gap in YouGov’s government approve/disapprove numbers and suggests that current conditions are ones “in which the main opposition party should be miles ahead, not a measly five points. ”

This is particularly so because unlike before the creation of the coalition Labour is now the “only major, Britain-wide opposition party”. Labour has an effecting anti-coalition monopoly yet is failing to attract enough of the anti-government support.

Looking forward, of course, the current effective three sided choice that voters have – supporting the government, Labour or the minor parties is not likely to exist at the general election. The coalition partners will probably go their own way for the campaign presenting a four choice range of options.

The polling situation is made much more complicated by the fact that a large slab of Tory and Lib Dem voters from last May are simply saying now that they “don’t know” – rather than switch to Labour. One reason why ICM is showing a different picture for the LDs and, to an extent, the Tories is that it operates its formula for dealing with the “don’t knows” who say they will vote. The pollster allocates half in line with what those people said they did last time.

If all the pollsters operated in a similar fashion then Labour’s position would looking nothing like as it does at the moment.

Mike Smithson

PB 2011 predictions now out

The AV referendum is predicted to result in a “No” vote – that’s the main finding from the 2011 Politicalbetting Prediction Competition.

104 of the site’s sharpest pundits took part in PB’s annual crystal ball-gazing exercise, looking at everything from the state of the party leaders at Christmas and the opinion polls, to UK interest rates, the GOP race and the Irish election. Full details of the player-by-player predictions are available here.

Competition entrants expect the Yes vote in the AV referendum to be about 45% – only 33% of entrants predicted a Yes vote of 50% and above. There is a very high expectation that Cameron, Clegg, and Miliband will be PM, Deputy PM, and Labour leader at Christmas, Miliband having the lowest score here with 94%.

However, only 20% of respondents predict that Alex Salmond will still be Scottish First Minister by 25th December, while in the race to be the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney has a clear lead as the expected poll leader by Christmas, with 46% of respondents, while Sarah Palin came in at 22%, not far ahead of Mike Huckabee on 15%. Meanwhile new Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin has received a major boost with the news that FF are predicted to win a meltdown-avoiding 40 seats in the upcoming Irish election.

In the opinion poll predictions (using PAPA), the average highs and lows for the three main parties were (Lab/Con/LD) 45/41/16 and 37/33/8, with the average for the largest Labour lead being 10 points, and the average largest Conservative lead being 1 point.

Elsewhere, the Leaders and Finance predictions for December 2011 have been published in the Election Game, with 80 entries altogether. In the Leaders game, players were asked to “buy” or “sell” leaders according to whether they would be in a named post (usually their current one) at 31st December. Buy percentages included 78 for Theresa May, 69 for Liam Fox, and 61 for Ken Clarke, but just 54 for Peter Robinson, 38 for Vince Cable, and 31 for Alex Salmond.

Abroad meanwhile, 60% of respondents “bought” Berlusconi, while 55% said that Palin would be a declared candidate at the end of the year. Average Finance predictions for 30th December were as follows: FTSE 100 6279, US Dollar $1.5854 to £1, Euro €1.2595 to £1, and the oil price (Brent crude) to be $100.87 per barrel. Full details of the Election Game predictions are here (click on the 2011 tables) and the next game will be for Ireland.

Finally, can I wish all PB’ers a very successful 2011 in punting – did anyone else cash in on Martin as new FF leader? And for my money, by far the most interesting political story at the moment is Egypt – Al Jazeera has generally had the best coverage IMHO.

Double Carpet

Double Carpet runs the Election Game as well as being part of the PB Editorial team, and can be followed on Twitter under @electiongame

What’s the consequence of not holding it on May 5th?

In the next few days big decisions will have to be taken on the voting and constituencies bill which has been held up by the massive Labour filibuster in the Lords.

Ministers have three choices:

To try to force a guillotine on their lordships – an unprecedented step which might fail because cross-benchers are none too keen on the idea

To accede to the Labour demand to de-couple the AV referendum part of the bill from the constituency changes

To accept that they are not going to make the mid-Febrary deadline required for the vote to be held alongside the local, Scottish and Welsh elections on May 5th

I think that de-coupling would be too hard a measure for the Conservative party, which is none too keen on the referendum part anyway, to swallow and that if resistance continues then putting back the referendum is quite possible.

This would almost certainly mean that the referendum would be the only election taking place on the new date which is likely to have a huge impact on turnout. My guess is that it would be in the mid-20s as opposed to the mid-high 30s if it’s on May 5th.

What’s hard to call is which side would benefit most from fewer people overall taking part? Who are most motivated to vote?

What polling there’s been suggests that the traditional high turnout demographic segments, the older middle-classes, are less enamoured with change than the young. That could be balanced by the YES campaign having a more positive message than NO.

I also wonder whether the Tory polling position might cause some in the party to change their traditional view. Essentially the blues believe that voting reform could stop them from ever forming a majority government again. But if the polling suggests that there is no prospect of an outright victory anyway then voting reform could be seen as helping the coalition parties prevent Labour from returning.

Mike Smithson