United Kingdom General Election: July 4, 2024

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Worth bearing in mind that the poll was carried out under the auspices of the ‘Conservative Britain Alliance’ (a Lord Frost linked outfit) and is being spun as an warning to the Tories that they need to shift rightwards in order to head off vote splitting with Reform, who apparently would deprive them of ninety-six seats and hand Labour a majority under this model. To put it mildly, I don’t regard this as credible, given the shares the Conservatives (and Labour) are getting in all other published opinion polls and the lack of any hard evidence for a Reform surge in by-elections at the constituency/local government level. To be taken with a gritter’s worth of salt.

That isn't the polling which needs to be taken with a load of salt though (just regular levels) - it's the laughable 'analysis' from the Telegraph. The Tories winning 96 seats without Reform is entirely an invention of the Telegraph, not YouGov.

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Interesting to see the stark difference between YouGov's MRP model and their standard opinion polling. Almost a 14% difference in the lead between the two polls is HUGE and I think would be more widely discussed within the media if the polls were closer (for example, a 14% difference in lead would be the difference between the 2019 result and Jeremy Corbyn being in Number 10).

It could just be an outlier lead for Labour, but even then there does seem to be a consistent trend of YouGov opinion polls being above the average (note that this doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong, just different). If we assume that polls will tighten as the election comes around, it will be interesting to see how much this disaparity between polling firms (or between MRP and opinion polling) will hold and how this will affect the media narrative.

YouGov used different methodology to their usual for the MRP. Their normal methodology tends to overemphasise trends (I guess as a result of using a politically 'switched on' panel). Rather than tending to be better for Labour / Tories / Lib Dems etc., YouGov generally shows parties doing well doing very well, and those doing badly very badly.

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I know MRP polls are supposed to be viewed in the macro, rather than the granular, but there’s some *weird* stuff in the Survation projection:

Labour winning the Tory-Lib Dem marginals of Hazel Grove, as well as Woking for one. They’re also winning Frome and East Somerset, the prototypical Lib Dem tactical voting seat.

The difficulty is that on a national and basically all demographic level, the Labour vote is up a lot while the Lib Dem vote is static. There is no scientifically rigorous way to model which constituencies will see tactical voting for the Lib Dems and which will see a credible Lib Dem vote fall away in Labour’s favour. They could stick some arbitrary tactical voting on the numbers eg; Labour vote will rise a lot less where the Lib Dems are 2nd, but it would clearly still be arbitrary and wrong in many places as well. There’s similarly a long-standing issue with MRPs (some more than others), where the vote for parties is flattened and it’s particularly striking for the Labour vote in Tory-Lib Dem marginals. A lot of this is simply a reflection of the underlying Labour vote (both natural Labour voters and people who are defaulting to them nationally as the non-Tory option) which will be squeezed by the Lib Dems come election day.

The Electoral Calculus MRP a few weeks back was a bit more plausible in that respect, but even it had Labour ahead in Chichester, for example. I’d quite like to see one of those YouGov ones with a proper MRP sample size, but they’ve only done them during the actual campaign.

They did one in January - https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/48371-yougov-mrp-shows-labour-would-win-1997-style-landslide-if-election-were-held-today

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I wonder how long they maintain the delusion of the '20' part. Perhaps it quietly transforms into 'list of seats lost at by-elections in this Parliament', plus Leicester East (sigh).

I'm living in Bedford atm and they are still putting out a large amount of literature (all delivered via Royal Mail, needless to say). It really is the mark of an incredibly clueless national campaign.

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First Scottish poll of the campaign, from More In Common:

• Labour 35%
• SNP 30%
• Conservatives 17%
• Liberal Democrats at 10%
• Reform UK 4%
• Greens at 3%

If you plug that into a universal swing model, it puts us roughly on 28 Lab, 16 SNP, 8 Tory, 5 Lib Dem. Usual disclaimers about universal swing and tactical voting apply - we don't know how well anti-SNP unionist tactical voting will hold up compared to anti-Tory tactical voting.

They haven't polled Scotland before but they are an accurate. (especially in May) A deep dive suggests their weighting method prompts don't knows which is something you want to see at this point in polling. That is favourable to Labour. Also a more realistic Lib Dem vote.


On a personal note, a five point deficit isn't what I want to see, but the fundamentals are not as bad as they could be for the SNP especially compared to more recent polls, particularly on voter retention.

How effecient is the Labour vote in Scotland? a 35-30 margin enough for 12 more seats?

Easily.

The vote efficiency depends a lot on how well the party is doing.

The SNP for example have an extremely efficient vote when they are doing well (their even vote allows them to win everywhere), but when they start dropping back their vote becomes extremely inefficient, particularly if it were a three way split with both Labour and the Tories (in which case the SNP would be second virtually everywhere, whilst the two unionist parties would split a bunch of 1sts and 3rds).

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Debate next week confirmed for ITV. Sunak and Starmer only. More specific details have yet to be announced.

Well this seems silly there. With the way things are going, it is not outside the realm of possibility for Reform or Lib Dem to perform effectively as well as the Conservatives. You can always direct more questions to the two leading parties. But they should have the five largest national parties for a national debate.

I can’t see the Tories agreeing to a multi party debate, certainly not with Rishi attending. It’d be three against one (well four as they’d also invite the SNP). The Tories want a horse race that marginalises the legitimacy of the Lib Dems and Reform, they’d have to be morons to agree to a multi party debate (then again…)

And unlike in America there isn’t some historical norm of debating that he’d be embarrassingly breaking. Iirc 2010 was the first ever live debate, and just about every election before then one was mooted but rejected by a leader.

Completely wrong. The Tories would love nothing more than forcing Keir Starmer to share a stage with a load of minor party leaders (Greens, SNP, Plaid) hitting him from his left about Gaza, and it allows them to lean into their 'coalition of chaos' messaging.

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Debate next week confirmed for ITV. Sunak and Starmer only. More specific details have yet to be announced.

Well this seems silly there. With the way things are going, it is not outside the realm of possibility for Reform or Lib Dem to perform effectively as well as the Conservatives. You can always direct more questions to the two leading parties. But they should have the five largest national parties for a national debate.

I can’t see the Tories agreeing to a multi party debate, certainly not with Rishi attending. It’d be three against one (well four as they’d also invite the SNP). The Tories want a horse race that marginalises the legitimacy of the Lib Dems and Reform, they’d have to be morons to agree to a multi party debate (then again…)

And unlike in America there isn’t some historical norm of debating that he’d be embarrassingly breaking. Iirc 2010 was the first ever live debate, and just about every election before then one was mooted but rejected by a leader.

Completely wrong. The Tories would love nothing more than forcing Keir Starmer to share a stage with a load of minor party leaders (Greens, SNP, Plaid) hitting him from his left about Gaza, and it allows them to lean into their 'coalition of chaos' messaging.

Why would they do that? Rishi is a consistently poor speaker and has no debating chops. They'd take turns getting free hits on the weak target that can generate soundbites for the News at Ten and social media. And ultimately however much they dislike Keir they all have far bigger beefs with this Tory government.
And for the realists in the Tory camp, the election is already lost and it's about saving the furniture. And the single biggest threat to the Tory backbenches is Reform being legitimised on a national stage and splitting the vote.

The (successful) Tory tactics in debates in 2015, 17 and 19 was to widen out the debates as far as they can to take in as many shades of fringe left opinion as possible and have their own representative try to stand above the fray. Of course that allows e.g. Plaid Cymru to have a shot at them, but those 'moments' only really serve to galvanise some strand of leftish opinion rather than actually weakening the Conservatives.

The Greens / SNP / Plaid would all absolutely take their shots against Labour, and strategically they would be correct to do so. Labour are a much bigger threat to their chances than the Conservatives.

And Sunak isn't a great debater, but he did fine standing in for Johnson in 2019. And let's not kid ourselves that there is some magnetic speaker in one of the opposition parties. Starmer, Davey, Tice, Swinney and whatever no mark is currently leading the Green Party are just as uncharismatic as Sunak.

Sunak's real weakness is not in debating his opponents (not that he's brilliant) but in interacting with the public.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqee94582d5o

Sinn Féin not running in four NI constituencies. It seems like the nationalist and unionists are both expanding their pacts from last time.

Quoted for posterity:

It's easy to see a theoretical path where SDLP/SF would carve up West of the Bann, and Alliance/SF dominate the East, yet this is never considered.

Why would Alliance ever make a deal with Sinn Fein? The core of their support is moderate Unionists who probably hate Sinn Fein even more than the DUP.

It seems being a party strategist with your reputation on the line makes you more realistic than Atlas posters, who'd have thought.

Alliance have not made a deal with Sinn Féin, and doing such a thing would be political kryptonite. Sinn Féin have unilaterally decided to stand down in constituencies where they have no chance (including a couple where they routinely fail to break 2%). This will not be reciprocated by Alliance.

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It’s nice to have some more MRP polling. That being said, the YouGov MRP in Scotland is a little baffling.  



Headline examples:

• Lib Dems on the precipice of losing their best seats (Edinburgh West and Orkney&Shetland) to the SNP.
• The SNP poised to lose safe seats like Stirling and Alloa&Grangemouth to Labour, while holding seats in Glasgow to “toss up” status.

The seat totals look fairly plausible for current polling, but the seat-by-seat modelling feels off. The error bars are their own story…

I think UK-wide MRPs can struggle in Scotland because it has very different poltical dynamics and they don't have enough data to handle it separately.

And it is always going to have particularly large margins of error in Lib Dem v SNP seats, for the simple reason that there are barely any of them. Similarly, looking at the Plaid Cymru seats, or the Labour v Green battleground is unlikely to be too illuminating. There simply isn't enough of a sample.

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I can't think of any obvious reason why that would change anyone's vote.

This is the main takeaway, though if we are to dive into the debate then on balance I'd say Sunak, despite being belligerent and consistently bulldozing the (female) moderator, narrowly got the better of Starmer. Both of them were pretty awful however - Starmer's failure to refute Sunak's, ahem, 'stretching' of the truth on tax rises, followed up by the zinger 'I would raise specific taxes' (coming to a FB ad near you) in particular was utter political malpractice - and the moderator was similarly abysmal.

Certainly the big loser of the debate was the audience.

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As already mentioned Ipsos has consistently been the SNP's strongest pollster in recent years, and in addition Opinium probably their second best (though they don't poll Scotland that often) so we very much need some contributions from those who have shown Labour clearly ahead recently (not a poll as such, but in R&W's recent megapoll a big Scottish sample had a 10 point lead for Labour)

The R&W 'weighted subsamples' are as trashy as their usual subsamples. Best ignored.