UK General Election - May 7th 2015

[YL]

If correct it's worth noting that Ashcroft is predicting that the SNP will win in areas they didn't win in 2011 (Glasgow, Lanarkshire etc)

Given the referendum results and the polls I don't find this surprising.  In fact, Ashcroft has polled mainly "Yes" areas: his 16 seats include Dundee West, all seven Glasgow seats, West Dunbartonshire, and the four North Lanarkshire seats [1].  The SNP are ahead in all of these except Glasgow NE.  It would have been more interesting if he'd polled some Labour-held "No" areas too.

He also polled two Lib Dem held seats, Salmond's Gordon, where Salmond is well ahead but not by quite as much as I thought he might be, and Inverness et al, where, unless the poll is totally wrong, Danny Alexander is toast.

[1] Coatbridge, Chryston & Bellshill; Airdrie & Shotts; Motherwell & Wishaw; Cumbernauld, Kilsyth & Kirkintilloch East.  (What happened to Kirkintilloch West?)

[YL]

Here are the figures for the parties over 10% in each seat.  These are for the first question ("standard" voting intention); the constituency question boosts the LDs by 5 points each in their two held seats but doesn't make much difference in most cases.

Airdrie & Shotts: SNP 46 Lab 38
Coatbridge et al: SNP 46 Lab 41
Cumbernauld et al: SNP 48 Lab 36
Dundee W: SNP 58 Lab 25
Glasgow C: SNP 46 Lab 36
Glasgow E: SNP 46 Lab 39
Glasgow N: SNP 43 Lab 33 Green 10
Glasgow NE: Lab 46 SNP 39
Glasgow NW: SNP 43 Lab 38
Glasgow S: SNP 46 Lab 33 Con 10
Glasgow SW: SNP 42 Lab 41
Gordon: SNP 41 LD 21 Lab 17 Con 15
Inverness et al: SNP 48 LD 16 Con 14 Lab 14
Motherwell & Wishaw: SNP 48 Lab 38
Paisley & Renfrewshire S: SNP 45 Lab 39
West Dunbartonshire: SNP 45 Lab 36

[YL]

Speaking of large swings, we have a Survation poll of Sheffield Hallam: Lab 33 LD 23 Con 22 Green 12 UKIP 9.

Take with appropriate quantities of salt, especially the ward crossbreaks, which are hilarious, though given the methodology (no reallocation of don't knows) the headline figures tell a similar story to the other polls of the constituency (including the ICM/Oakeshott one Survation themselves publicly criticised).

[YL]

Speaking of large swings, we have a Survation poll of Sheffield Hallam: Lab 33 LD 23 Con 22 Green 12 UKIP 9.

Take with appropriate quantities of salt, especially the ward crossbreaks, which are hilarious, though given the methodology (no reallocation of don't knows) the headline figures tell a similar story to the other polls of the constituency (including the ICM/Oakeshott one Survation themselves publicly criticised).

Survation's previous constituency polls - before by-elections - have been pretty poor, especially when compared to the Ashcroft ones. I wouldn't read too much into this.

Anthony Wells has written an article on UKPollingReport about the Hallam polls, specifically the Ashcroft and Survation ones and the methodological differences between them.  As he says, most of the difference between their headline figures is down to the reallocation of don't knows, because there are a lot of 2010 Clegg voters in Hallam who are now telling pollsters they don't know.  Survation didn't do any reallocation of don't knows at all, and Ashcroft, unusually, reallocated all don't knows back to their old parties.  As I said above, once you take account of this, the polls aren't telling very different stories.

Wells doesn't mention the ICM/Oakeshott poll.  That poll had fairly similar methodology to the Survation poll, though its question was a little less constituency-specific and its sample size was smaller, and it produced pretty similar figures.

I still tend to think that Clegg will just about hold on.  Many of those don't knows probably will go back to him, he'll squeeze the Tories, the local Lib Dem party is very well organised (though Labour seems to be getting its act together too), the demographics aren't those of a Labour seat, and there's always a bit of a suspicion that constituency polls are prone to dodgy samples.  But I think it's fair to say that he has problems.

[YL]

(Btw, iirc even the Ashcroft poll had a generic Labour candidate  up like 10-15 percentage points over a generic LibDem candidate in Hallam, and it was only after being explicitly prompted to consider the situation in their own constituencythat those interrogated broke narrowly in favour of Clegg.)

Sort of.  The initial figures showing the Lib Dems on only 17% (and in third; the Tories were on 23%, 10 points behind Labour) were without reallocation and on the "standard" voting question (the one Ashcroft asks first).  Both changes were needed to put Clegg ahead; essentially asking the constituency-specific question caused a swing from Con to Lib Dem without changing the Labour figure much, and the 100% reallocation of don't knows helped the Lib Dems considerably.

In other constituency poll news, we now have one for East Belfast, conducted by LucidTalk (anyone have any idea about their track record?) for the Belfast Telegraph (article here).  Excluding don't knows and non-voters, the DUP are on 34.4% (yay, decimal points...) and Alliance on 28.7%.  Could be worse for Alliance, actually.

[YL]

The Ashcroft Hallam poll, and the South Thanet and Doncaster North ones done at the same time, were clearly carried out incompetently, and you wonder what else might be wrong with them.  The correction announced yesterday is, I understand, that the 100% reallocation of don't knows has been changed to something more normal.  Ashcroft has said he won't be using the polling company which did them again.

That said, the messages from the three Hallam polls are all quite similar.  Unless there's some systematic sampling problem in the constituency which they've all had, there's some information in them. FWIW the only constituency poll I'm aware of in Hallam for a previous election was in 1997, and it predicted the big swing from the Tories to the Lib Dems pretty accurately.  The record of constituency polling in the UK since 1997 is mixed, but it's not totally awful.

[YL]

Here is a list of seats (excluding the Speaker's seat and Northern Ireland) where Labour currently has no candidate, based on the list of candidates compiled by andyajs of the VoteUK forum.

Arundel & South Downs
Banff & Buchan
Beaconsfield
Bradford West
South Cambridgeshire
North Cornwall
South East Cornwall
East Devon
Edmonton*
Grantham & Stamford
Halifax*
North East Hampshire
Orkney & Shetland
Midlothian*
East Surrey
Torfaen*
Truro & Falmouth
Yeovil
York Central*

Seats marked with an asterisk have had their sitting Labour MPs announce their retirements fairly recently.  I think it's fair to say that all the others, with one exception which is related to some recent posts, are no hopers for the party (even if one of them had a Labour MP fairly recently due to a defection).

[YL]

It's Ukip, the party that chose Neil Hamilton as its deputy chairman.

OK, I realise that UKIP's judgement on such matters has been shown to be questionable (to put it mildly) before, but why parachute Hargreaves into a seat (not a particularly good seat for them, I wouldn't have thought) where they already had a candidate?  Is there some hotbed of fundies in Earlsdon or something?

[YL]

This week's YouGov polls:

10 Feb: Con 34 Lab 33 UKIP 14 Green 7 LD 7 SNP/Plaid 5
11 Feb: Lab 35 Con 33 UKIP 13 Green 8 LD 6 SNP/Plaid 4
12 Feb: Lab 33 Con 32 UKIP 15 Green 7 LD 7 SNP/Plaid 4
13 Feb: Lab 34 Con 31 UKIP 15 Green 7 LD 7 SNP/Plaid 5
15 Feb: Lab 35 Con 32 UKIP 15 LD 7 Green 7 SNP/Plaid 4

[YL]

Labour's very slow progress in choosing a Bradford West candidate. AWS; Galloway describes one of them as a "carpet-bagger"!

Update.  There's now a shortlist of three, with hustings next Saturday, two locals and a Tower Hamlets councillor.

[YL]

Oh dear, is there anything by anyone that this forum likes? I may be insufficiently cynical for its tastes.

I don't think you need to be particularly cynical to notice that quite a lot of political punditry is Not Very Good.  This isn't an exclusively UK phenomenon either; remember the 2012 US campaign, especially that Dick Morris Obama vs. Romney map?

In this case, the article quotes Matthew Goodwin; did you expect Al to have a high opinion of it?  (Actually, I'd be quite interested if Al would find the time to give a more detailed critique of Goodwin and Ford.)

[YL]

UKIP's parachuting of George Hargreaves into Coventry South is apparently off, and the original candidate has been reinstated:
http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/ukip-scraps-general-election-plan-8670771

[YL]

Notice that at the constituency level support for the Greens falls to low single digits

Uhh it's already on low single digits in the standard voting intention...

Some national polls suggest the Greens are as high as 7 or 8 percent. This suggests they are more like 2 or 3%

These are not constituencies you would expect the Greens to be doing well in.

[YL]

UKIP struggling to make a breakthrough in places they're targeting, where they did well in May last year.

This is quite a big change from Survation's poll of Boston & Skegness released last September, which had UKIP 20 points ahead of the Tories.

There are various things which may help to explain this:
- Dodgy sampling in one or both polls.
- Survation's sample size was pretty small, so they had a big margin of error.
- Methodological differences.  Ashcroft's mystery pollster reallocated some don't knows (not 100%), without which UKIP would have been slightly ahead; Survation didn't.  (As we've seen in Hallam, the choice of what to do with don't knows can make a big difference when looking at a large swing.)  I think the weighting methods, including the handling of turnout, are also different, and Ashcroft's turnout weighting certainly cut the UKIP figure.

Or perhaps UKIP's bubble really has burst a bit there.

[YL]

Will Clegg be defeated?

From an article in the Guardian a couple of days ago, about the Lib Dems' internal constituency polling:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Now, this looks to me like the sort of thing they might say if their internal polling (and maybe canvassing) was giving a similar picture to the Ashcroft poll (i.e. a near dead heat or a small Labour lead).  Given the context of the article, if it was saying that Clegg was well ahead, it's pretty clear that they would have told the journalists that.

I wouldn't take much of the rest of the content of the article very seriously.  Even if you trust constituency polls, a party showing some selected findings from their internal ones, several of which are not exactly surprising (yes, we know the people of Westmorland like Tim Farron), to journalists is never going to be a reliable indication of what's going on.  (Supposedly they did over 100; that leaves quite a lot the journalists weren't told about...)

[YL]

This week's YouGov polls:

17 Feb: Con 32 Lab 32 UKIP 16 Green 8 LD 6 SNP/Plaid 4
18 Feb: Lab 34 Con 33 UKIP 15 Green 7 LD 6 SNP/Plaid 4
19 Feb: Lab 34 Con 32 UKIP 14 LD 8 Green 6 SNP/Plaid 4
20 Feb: Lab 33 Con 32 UKIP 15 LD 9 Green 6 SNP/Plaid 5
22 Feb: Lab 34 Con 33 UKIP 13 LD 8 Green 6 SNP/Plaid 5

That must be the best Lib Dem week in YouGov for a bit.

[YL]

George Galloway finally has a Labour opponent in Bradford West, Amina Ali, a Tower Hamlets councillor.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/21/george-galloway-amina-ali_n_6727514.html

[YL]

And Labour are 6% ahead in England with Ashcroft, representing an 8-9% swing.

Again, can we really trust a pollster as volatile (to say the least) as Ashcroft national?

I wonder who he uses. ICM or ComRes judging by the wild swings.

As I said in November:

The high volatility of the Ashcroft polls is probably simply down to having a fairly small effective sample size.  The "headline" sample size may be 1000, but the actual voting intention figures in this Monday's poll are based on just 522 respondents.

ICM's polls have similar effective sample sizes, and are also quite volatile.

[YL]

Rifkind is to stand down as a result of current newspaper headlines. Majority of 24.5% with a very high Tory floor.

The current incarnation of Kensington is actually quite a bit less safe than the old Kensington & Chelsea was -- it might well have gone Labour in 1997 had it existed -- but this is still a nice late vacancy for some Tory to get.

Rifkind's behaviour over the last couple of days has not made him go up in my estimation.

[YL]

George Galloway finally has a Labour opponent in Bradford West, Amina Ali, a Tower Hamlets councillor.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/21/george-galloway-amina-ali_n_6727514.html

It appears that she may have stepped down, although there is some confusion:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/25/galloway-amina-ali-bradfo_n_6749798.html?utm_hp_ref=tw

[YL]

lol, is that a joke

For which parties? I have no idea how they calculate political party positions though.

Well, I presume they don't do it by going through the questions and thinking about how the leading figures in the parties would answer them, because I don't see how they could get anything like that chart.  (It'd be hard to do that for quite a few of the questions, of course.  I have no idea what Nick Clegg thinks about abstract art.)

I also think it's misleading to summarise a party's position by a single point, even if the points themselves made more sense.

[YL]

Update:

Here is a list of seats (excluding the Speaker's seat and Northern Ireland) where Labour currently has no candidate, based on the list of candidates compiled by andyajs of the VoteUK forum.

Arundel & South Downs
Banff & Buchan
Beaconsfield
Bradford West
South Cambridgeshire
North Cornwall
South East Cornwall
East Devon
Edmonton*
Grantham & Stamford
Halifax*
North East Hampshire
Midlothian*
Orkney & Shetland
East Surrey
Torfaen*
Truro & Falmouth
Yeovil
York Central*

Seats marked with an asterisk have had their sitting Labour MPs announce their retirements fairly recently.  I think it's fair to say that all the others, with one exception which is related to some recent posts, are no hopers for the party (even if one of them had a Labour MP fairly recently due to a defection).

[YL]

And we have another dodgy constituency poll!

South Thanet, courtesy of Survation (oh dear) and funded by UKIP donor Alan Bown: UKIP 39, Labour 28, Con 27, Green 3, LDem 2

If this is to be compared to other polls of the same constituency, then it should be noted that this one, unlike the others so far, prompted with candidate names, and that one of the candidates has very high name recognition.

In other news, I've found out who I would vote for if I lived in Cities of London & Westminster .

[YL]

This week's YouGov polls:

24 Feb: Con 33 Lab 33 UKIP 13 LD 8 Green 7 SNP/Plaid 4
25 Feb: Con 35 Lab 33 UKIP 14 Green 7 LD 6 SNP/Plaid 5
26 Feb: Lab 33 Con 33 UKIP 15 LD 8 Green 6 SNP/Plaid 5
27 Feb: Lab 34 Con 33 UKIP 13 LD 8 Green 6 SNP/Plaid 4
1 Mar: Lab 34 Con 34 UKIP 14 LD 8 Green 5 SNP/Plaid 4

[YL]

Labour have a candidate in Bradford West again.