Politics

Election Digest

MORI's first weekly poll for The Times of the 2001 election campaign

Four years ago some four million people, one elector in ten, enlisted in Tony's Army, saying that they supported the Labour Party and that they encouraged others to vote Labour without being asked. Only a quarter as many were canvassing others on behalf of John Major's Conservative Party.

What will be the main issues of the election of 2001?

Election Commentary - Votes and Seats
First campaign poll finds widening gap
Key public services deemed worse than in 1997
NOP/Daily Express election survey
Capital's business executives rate PM and Chancellor above Shadow counterparts
Pundits predict 143-seat majority
Voting Intentions in Scotland

Two polls, both by NOP, are the first out of the gate in the general election. We can draw some lessons from how they are reported.

Opinion polls measure the electorate's intentions in votes, not in seats. We can — if nothing goes wrong — measure voting intention percentages directly, and would hope to be accurate within our margins of error. But projecting the number of seats that a given share of the votes would give, although it produces a better headline, involves much greater uncertainties, and we rarely have the information we need to produce such figures with anything approaching precision.

Election Commentary - And They're Off...
Canvass Leaks Suggests Election Downturn for Tories
Two Negatives, but still positive for Labour
NOP/Powerhouse Poll: Tories Up

The election begins with the most recently published polls* by all the companies showing Labour's lead over the Tories slightly lower than was the case before the election was called in 1997: