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Welcome to the 183rd edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which this time rounds-up new information to follow-up previous stories. The trio of updates cover assisted dying, the Lib Dems and the views of young men.
These are followed by a summary of the latest national voting intention polls, seat projections from MRPs and the most recent party leader ratings.
Subscribers who pay for the full edition can also read ten insights from the latest polling and analysis. These include:
Which party people see as most normal;
Views on the policing of public demonstrations; and
Polling for the Caerphilly Senedd by-election.
If you are not yet a paying subscriber, you can read all the answers by starting a free trial now:
This week’s trigger for a raising of the eyebrows was the current content of the former People Polling website, which appears to have been taken over by spammers. If you linked to their polls in the past, it may be an idea to remove those links or update them to point at archived versions of the site.
More on the poll (not) about assisted dying
I wrote last week about problems with The Independent’s report claiming “New poll suggests public back peers in voting down assisted dying bill”. I pointed out problems with the figures cited and the question wording used.
Glossy print-offs of that newspaper report have been posted anonymously to members of the House of Lords, and Peter Kellner is not impressed:
Peers beware: Flawed polling and flawed journalism are distorting the debate over assisted dying…
How should journalists treat such polls? Here is a checklist. First, name the client as well as the pollster, so that readers/listeners/viewers know the full provenance of the information. Second, make sure that the poll really is about the issue set out in the headline and the first paragraph. Third, on polls about great controversies, report the don’t knows. Fourth, check other polls on the same subject. If there seems to be a discrepancy, find out why and report the explanation.
The Independent story did none of these things.
Read his piece in full here:
There is, by the way, no regulator to complain to as The Independent has chosen to sign up to neither IPSO nor Impress.
Thank you to one of my readers, also Mark, who pointed out that ChatGPT-5 did a much better job of summarising polling on this topic than the two other AI tools I mentioned in my piece.
More on the polls and the Lib Dems
Two weeks ago I wrote about an important conclusion from polling data about Liberal Democrat voters:
This is, perhaps, the most under-appreciated point about the contemporary nature of Lib Dem support. Because the party’s general election efforts were so focused on winning Parliamentary seats from the Conservatives, people often wrongly assume that meant it was all about appealing to voters who are very different from those who supported Labour. In fact, the sort of voter coalitions that did so well in target seats when there was an unpopular Conservative government are pretty similar to the sort of voter coalitions that the party needs to do well in a new era of an unpopular Labour government.
Marios Richards has added an important additional point: while it is true to point out how few Conservative to Lib Dem switchers there were in the 2024 general election, this does not mean they were unimportant to the Lib Dem wins in 2024. Rather, “LD-Con losses in 2024 are small and not very socially liberal because they follow from losses on that flank in 2015-2017 and 2017-2019.”
In other words, look back further than 2019 and you do indeed see a chunk of socially liberal voters abandon the Conservatives for the Lib Dems. Not many more of them did that in 2024, but keeping those who had previously made the switch was an important part of the Lib Dem result in 2024.
More on what Gen Z men really think
Horror stories about what polls supposedly show young people - and particularly young men - think about women’s rights, democracy and other topics have been a repeated source of debunking pieces in this newsletter (hello Channel 4!)
New data from YouGov brings some further reassurance on what people actually think:
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Elsewhere from me…
I have done a podcast with Phil Cowley about his excellent new book, packed full of 50 gems of insight from political science:
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50 gems from political science: Phil Cowley's new book Mark Pack |
Get The Smallest Room in the House: 50 political oddities to read in more than one sitting by Phil Cowley from Waterstones, Amazon (including e-book version) or Bookshop.org.
If you spot a factual error…
Borrowing an idea from Stuart Ritchie and others, if you spot a factual error in an edition of this newsletter, I will give you 12 months free subscription to the paid-for version of this newsletter (or an extra 12 months on your existing one). Factual rather than grammatical errors, and factual errors rather than disagreements over interpretation. Though messages about both of those are always very welcome.
Voting intentions and leadership ratings
Here are the latest national voting intention figures from each of the pollsters currently active.
In early October there appears to have been a small (1-2 point) boost to the Conservative vote at the expense mostly of Reform (down 2-3 points). That has not gone further in the most recent post-conference polls, but it also has not reverted back, so far at least.
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Next, the latest seat projections from MRP models and similar, also sorted by fieldwork dates. As these are infrequent, note how old the ‘latest’ data is.
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Finally, a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by pollster name:
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For more details, and updates during the week as each new poll comes out, see my regularly updated tables here and follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.
For the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Catch up on the previous two editions
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How are the main parties viewed by the public?, and other polling news
The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are only for subscribers who pay for the full edition, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.
YouGov has wrapped up its conference season polling: “Over the party conference season, YouGov has looked at how Britons see each of the five main political parties in turn, focussing on the areas in which the public trust them … Let’s compare how the British public see the major parties.”...
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