Two Weeks To Go
A four week campaign, half gone, and the Tories are becalmed with their core vote of around 30% +/- 3%, just where they've been ever since William Hague instead of Ken Clarke was chosen as Leader of the Conservative Party. At times like these, one speculates "what if ... ".
As I reported yesterday, ICM published in the Guardian a voting intention on a 1000 case telephone poll carried out on 19-21 May, of 45% Labour, 32% Tory, 17% Liberal Democrat, which according to their own share to seats model projects to 145. Of course, if you enter the result last time into the same model, you get a 143-seat majority, 36 seats fewer than the Labour majority on the day. So, you can add 36 seats to their model to put it on a comparable basis with all the others as a rough guide.
If however using the MORI model, which does project the shares last time to the 179 majority the Labour Party actually got, the ICM results yesterday projected to seats in the House of Commons would deliver Labour of the order of 177 seats, only two fewer than their famous 1997 landslide. And ICM are the Tory Party pollsters.
MORI in the Times continues its incredible 50%+ Labour share, with today's poll on 55%, hitting the highest level since November 1999, and matching the Gallup poll being conducted for the British Election Survey. The MORI sample of 1,066 British nation-wide, was taken face-to-face on Tuesday, 21st May.
MORI's findings for the Times are Labour 55%, Tories 30% and the Liberal Democrats at 11%, while Gallup's poll in the Telegraph splits the difference, giving Labour 48%, the Conservatives 32% and the Lib Dems 15%.
They can't all be right.
Further, if you do what I didn't allow a decade ago, extrapolate the shares to seats, the spread is from ICM's 177 (although they say 143) to Gallup's 213. Think of what Harold Wilson would have given for the Tory's pollsters to be projecting a Labour victory of nearly 200 seats!
The MORI findings narrow a point each way taking the "Certain/Very Likely" to vote, to 54% Labour, 31% Tory but only 9% Liberal Democrats. That would project to a majority of 289, still a disaster for the Conservatives generally and Mr. Hague particularly.
Among the more damning findings is that of those three in ten who plan to vote for the Tories, 20%, one in five do not think the Tory Party is ready to govern, and nearly three in ten, 30%, do not think that their Party's Leader, William Hague, is ready to be Prime Minister.
Only one person in four, 24%, say they think of themselves as Conservatives, and of those, just under a quarter, 23%, say they are not voting for Mr. Hague. The comparable figures for Labour at 41% who think of themselves as labour, and just 15% don't think they'll support Labour in this election.
A further sign of the weakness of the Tory Party in this poll is that when asked how strongly each supports the party of his/her choice, even at 30%, 69% of these say they support the Conservatives "strongly", while of the 55% who are intending Labour voters, and one might expect them to have "froth on the top", 74% of them say they support the Labour Party "strongly".
In another test of strength of support, three in ten intending Tory voters say they may change their mind, two points higher than the 28% of Labour supporters who say they might change theirs' between now and election day.
So why is there the wide divergence in the polls, wider than ever before? ICM does prompt their respondents by asking which party the person intends to vote for, and then prompts the parties by mentioning them in the question wording. Second, they report of likely voters. Third, they report on the likely voters rather than the adult population, and fourthly, as noted above, their model undershoots the likely size of the Labour share.
If the ICM raw figures were reported, as they are on the guardian web site, their 16 point Labour lead widens to a 23% lead, 28% for the Conservatives, down four, Labour at 51%, up six, and the Lib Dems 15%, down two.
Gallup's poll for the Telegraph now also prompts the respondent with the name of the Liberal Democrats, which boosts them a point or two, and reports on those they think most likely to vote, which squeezes their lead a couple of points. Then too, their poll for the Telegraph is in sharp contrast to their rolling poll for the British Election Survey run for the team at Essex University which continues to report a Labour share of 55% and the Tories on 25%. Never mind all the polls, both Gallup's polls can't be right!
One sobering finding for us all in the current Gallup poll in the Telegraph. Three people in four, 77%, agree that "All politicians quote statistics and figures that are meaningless to most people"!
Fourteen days and counting.
