The spread of foot-and-mouth disease through the rural areas has brought the rural vote back to the top of the election agenda - although, at the same time, it has thrown into some doubt whether there will be an election at all when we have all been confidently expecting it, on 3 May. I have already written [Rural Voters - 20 October 2000] about how much smaller and less influential the rural vote is than almost everybody supposes. But even some of those rural areas are simply rural in the sense of not being urban; they are not full of farmers. The genuinely agricultural vote is smaller still.
Q1 How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow?
[If undecided or refused at Q1]
Q2 Which party are you most inclined to support?
Base: 1,900
A few weeks ago I wrote here about how many seats each of the parties could hope to win in the election, assuming various levels of swing from the 1997 result; but I entered a caveat that this assumed uniform national swing, which in practice is unlikely.
Q1 How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow?
[If undecided or refused at Q1]
Q2 Which party are you most inclined to support?
Base: 1,900
The mightiest spin doctor of our time has now spun out of control. Peter Mandelson's lost the plot, and is now doing himself more damage than he is his party, his colleagues, his Prime Minister. A tragedy of our time.
Recent correspondence has reminded me that not everybody knows exactly how we set about asking respondents their voting intentions, or how we calculate the figures from their responses.
Peter Mandelson's resignation last week was an embarrassment to the government, and naturally led to much speculation that the government is acquiring a sleazy image that will damage it at the election. Two polls conducted since the resignation have explored this. Unfortunately the reporting of the second of these, an NOP poll for the Channel 4 programme Powerhouse, has misinterpreted its findings and perhaps as a consequence its implications.
