Political polling

[Shechemite]

It can be used to remind them how wrong they were - I don't think it says anything about how useless they are though. They were wrong to point at the polls and say 'anyone else would be 20 points ahead'. You're wrong to point at the polls and say 'this proves you're useless'. The times are unprecedented, and the polls can't be trusted to say anything right now except how the population is feeling about the pandemic.

Just about the pandemic? Nothing longer term that has made the Labour Party unappealing?

 

[killer b]

this is the polling showing public satisfaction with the government handling of Covid, currently at 43%, the same as in July last year



this one shows the party polling, with the lead at around 10%, the same as July last year



They follow the same pattern. There's various things the opposition could be doing that might make a small dent in the party polling (and could probably make a small dent in the covid polling too perhaps) but by and large, I don't think the opinion polls can tell us much more than how satisfied the public are with the covid effort.

(Don't take this as any indication of approval of Labour's current trajectory btw, I hate it)

 

[Knotted]

I don't think covid polling would be the same if Labour had set out a zero covid alternative strategy from the start.

 

[Knotted]

Also little curious thing - the vaccine bounce isn't all that much on the handling Covid approvals. I wouldn't put Labour's current woes entirely or even mostly down to that.

 

[killer b]

I don't think covid polling would be the same if Labour had set out a zero covid alternative strategy from the start.

Corbyn was still in charge at the start, and struggled to make any noise at all iirc

 

[Knotted]

Corbyn was still in charge at the start, and struggled to make any noise at all iirc

As outgoing opposition leader he was always going to be ignored. But more so, it's a matter of consistency, if they'd spent the last year putting forward a clearly different response and criticising the government from that perspective, it would filtered through. Plus if they'd been willing to say a few unpopular things, they would have got the headlines.

 

[ska invita]

View attachment 257360

thing about that poll of poll graph is it can be conservative with what it shows
there are these three result in yellow - and corresponding Tory results


outliers? I suspect not. of course its not just about polling results, its about whats actually happening in the world, and the thing is I think Starmer is failing deeply and those poll results show the bottom falling out amongst swing voters.

A week is a long time in politics and all that, and theres many weeks to come etc etc etc but when you add up poll results with what is actually happening I think its worse for Starmer than that poll of polls graph shows

 

[Knotted]

I don't think the poll of polls is conservative - there are outliers in both directions. But I think it lags behind when there are sudden changes of fortune.

 

[Wilf]

this is the polling showing public satisfaction with the government handling of Covid, currently at 43%, the same as in July last year

View attachment 257358

this one shows the party polling, with the lead at around 10%, the same as July last year

View attachment 257360

They follow the same pattern. There's various things the opposition could be doing that might make a small dent in the party polling (and could probably make a small dent in the covid polling too perhaps) but by and large, I don't think the opinion polls can tell us much more than how satisfied the public are with the covid effort.

(Don't take this as any indication of approval of Labour's current trajectory btw, I hate it)

I was actually looking at the same polling trajectory above, last night and thinking about it with regard to the pattern of the pandemic (in that Labour had a few poll leads in the Autumn at the time the government was fucking everything up over schools and the rest). There clearly does look to be a realtionship between party polling and perceptions of the government's handling of the pandemic. But ultimately, Labour's problem is that nobody knows what kind of party they are losing as. Blair's neo liberal non-threatening 'what works' modernisation mush had at least a degree of coherence, however much I/we detested it. Similarly, Corbyn's unimaginative social democracy had something for some voters to cling onto. Starmer's not even a shit version of Ed Miliband, there really is nothing there to sell to voters. Labour won't make anything out of the pandemic because they've nothing to say about anything else.

 

[Rimbaud]

Highest ever support for Welsh independence, new poll shows

Nearly 40% of people in Wales are in favour of independence, survey suggests

www.independent.co.uk

Welsh support for independence at 40%, with the rise driven mainly by the young.

I think this is a consequence of the Labour Party's purge of Corbynism. Social Democrats are politically homeless again - SNP filled the gap in Scotland pre-Corbyn, Plaid may be set to fill the gap created by Starmerism in Wales.

Performance of the Northern Independence Party is still too early to say, but they do also seem to be overwhelmingly young ex-Labour supporters turned off by Starmerism.

 

[Threshers_Flail]

Highest ever support for Welsh independence, new poll shows

Nearly 40% of people in Wales are in favour of independence, survey suggests

www.independent.co.uk

Welsh support for independence at 40%, with the rise driven mainly by the young.

I think this is a consequence of the Labour Party's purge of Corbynism. Social Democrats are politically homeless again - SNP filled the gap in Scotland pre-Corbyn, Plaid may be set to fill the gap created by Starmerism in Wales.

Performance of the Northern Independence Party is still too early to say, but they do also seem to be overwhelmingly young ex-Labour supporters turned off by Starmerism.

I'm not paying that much attention as I don't live in wales anymore but from what I've read, increased support for independence isn't leasing to an increase in polling for Plaid.

Plaid are useless. Veered too hard towards Remain and too cosy with the Tories to do one over Labour. Like yh fuck labour but don't get into bed with the Tories to do so.

 

[brogdale]

Wales

 

[brogdale]

"Go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government!"

 

[maomao]

View attachment 260967

"Go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government!"

Luckily Labour have an electable leader now eh. Wankers.

 

[JTG]

Just as a comparison, Labour were 4/5 points behind at the end of 2016 when the chicken coup plot was put into action

 

[Knotted]

Yougov seem to be consistently showing larger Tory leads since the start of March. I haven't got any broader point to make, except it's a little polling curiosity.

Edit: Even curiouser - Yougov were almost unique in having Labour leads in January. Change of methodologies?

 

[brogdale]

Not polling, as such, but a useful piece on the "Blue wall" of Tory marginals and the chances of them falling to centrist opponents:

The 'Blue Wall'

...rapidly liberalising suburbs which the Tories have long held, but which are fast trending away from them.

Detailed spreadsheet of the 'Blue wall' marginals here.

 

[redsquirrel]

Not polling, as such, but a useful piece on the "Blue wall" of Tory marginals and the chances of them falling to centrist opponents:

The 'Blue Wall'


Detailed spreadsheet of the 'Blue wall' marginals here.

Worth thinking about this piece from Jacobin, that while talking about the US, is pertinent to the above politics.

November’s third major winner, filling out the picture, was America’s headlong march toward a party system entirely decoupledfrom the politics of class. To be sure, the class-aligned politics of the long New Deal era — which happened to produce virtually every worthwhile national law, from Social Security to the Voting Rights Act — began to erode decades ago. But the last four years have seen a rapid acceleration of this trend, with Republicans winning larger and larger chunks of the non-college-educated working class, while Democrats gain more and more votes from affluent professionals and managers.

Yet the partisan politics of the Gilded Age, for all its storminess, was also the politics of class dealignment. Both Republicans and Democrats claimed the mantle of the American worker, accusing the other side of being owned by some privileged stratum of the elite — and they were both right. Although the two sides argued endlessly about economic issues, including tariffs and monetary policy, it was often difficult to identify any class-based fault lines underneath the ruckus.

Far more than any Democratic president in US history, Biden’s victory in 2020 depended not on blue-collar workers but on white-collar professionals. When class is measured by education, rather than income — “education polarization,” as liberal wonks prefer to call it — the working-class retreat from the Democrats looks even more dramatic.

The most influential version of denial acknowledges that Democrats have lost enormous support from white workers since 2012: the numbers here are simply too large to ignore. But by touting the loyalty of black and Latino voters, liberal pundits can still cast a narrative that flaunts Democrats as the party of a multiracial working class. They’re not wrong, exactly — no more than Gilded Age Republicans were wrong to claim that their support from Mississippi sharecroppers and Vermont dairymen made them the party of a multiracial working class. But it’s not a very convincing way to describe a party that is less and less competitive with over half the blue-collar workers in America.

For one prominent cluster of think-tank liberals, the changing Democratic coalition is not a fact to be mourned but an opportunity to be seized. As Trump draws the Republicans to “populism,” New America’s Lee Drutman argued after the 2016 election, the Democrats should work to win over “upscale cosmopolitan Republicans.” After Biden rode this advice to victory in 2020, the Brookings Institution issued a blunt pronouncement: “The future for Democrats is in the suburbs.”

In Illinois, billionaire governor J. B. Pritzker spent much of the year attempting to sell voters on a progressive tax on income above $250,000 a year — funding needed to avoid dire cuts to the state budget. But in a statewide referendum, the bifurcated Democratic coalition failed him. In Chicago, nonwhite working-class voters strongly backed Pritzker’s tax, with the South Side’s 8th Ward (97 percent black) and the West Side’s 22nd Ward (89 percent Latino) supporting the measure by over 50 points. Yet overall Democratic turnout in both these inner-city wards — where Joe Biden’s vote share also dropped — was down from 2012 and 2016.

Meanwhile, wealthy and well-educated Illinois Democrats backed Biden with far more enthusiasm than they mustered for Chicago’s own Barack Obama, but their support did not extend to the progressive tax.

I do not agree with all of Karp's thesis but he is absolutely correct in this final paragraph

As labor organizers battle in the trenches to challenge the power of capital, left electoral politics must continue to fight, against the partisan grain, for a working-class coalition. It is no great mystery why Democrats like Biden, Clinton, and Schumer have chosen the path of class dealignment, which suits both their electoral fortunes and the larger interests they serve. But for the fragile, fledgling Left that has emerged from the Sanders era, no choice could be more disastrous.

And compare that against Akehurst's piece (my emphasis)

Like most progressive movements in the post-industrial world, the British left is stuck between the voters moving away from it and those moving towards them.

no mention of social democracy (let alone socialism). Progressivism (which the LDs are to be part of) is the goal

 

[JTG]

Not polling, as such, but a useful piece on the "Blue wall" of Tory marginals and the chances of them falling to centrist opponents:

The 'Blue Wall'



Detailed spreadsheet of the 'Blue wall' marginals here.

Most of which are places Labour right wingers disingenuously criticised Momentum et al for targeting in 2019

 

[brogdale]

Tories on 72%

 

[brogdale]

Them tracker trends...

 

[ska invita]

Them tracker trends...

View attachment 263508

like i said upthread i think the tracker flatters labour

 

[magneze]

"electable"

 

[ska invita]

This latest -5% dip suggests Lab voters going Green/LibDem <as much as you can read into these things, that sounds like "left" voters moving away.

 

[splonkydoo]

Why would Corbyn do this?

 

[Knotted]

like i said upthread i think the tracker flatters labour

I don't agree. We just keep posting up Labour's worst polls.

 

[Flavour]

that is pretty fucking bad. How the fuck are the LDs on 8%.

 

[Chz]

that is pretty fucking bad. How the fuck are the LDs on 8%.

Locals are coming up, and they still have a following there. I know the poll is for Westminster, but the locals will be on some people's minds.

 

[Wilf]

Labour are such cunts who have got just about every strategic question wrong in the last few years - either in their attempt at being a social democratic party or in their continuing attempt at being centrist neo-liberals. And I hate them even more for the fact that it depresses the fuck out of me seeing them go further and further behind.

 

[JTG]

Greens and Lib Dems getting some of that sweet vaccine bounce