The scale of LAB’s lead in the parliament’s first polls is unprecedented
Never before has main opposition party had such margins after an election
We have now had three voting polls since the general election and all of them, as can be seen in the table above, have shown clear leads for Labour.
This is highly unusual and almost unprecedented. Almost always the first polls after a general election see the winner doing better than it did in the voting on the day.
Thanks to Mark Pack’s excellent Pollbase place we can ascertain that there has only ever been one case before of the main opposition party beating the election winner in the early polls of a new parliament.
The exception could bring some cheer to the Tories because Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives struggled in the early days of her Parliament after her 1979 General Election win. Then Gallup and NOP recorded LAB leads of up to 1.5% in the first surveys and we all know that Mrs T went on to win a landslide four years later.
But 1.5% is nothing like the scale of the first three voting intention polls of this parliament which have seen gaps of 3-6%.
My reading is that Corbyn is still benefiting from the sheer shock of the June 8th result partly because most of the pollsters got it so wrong. If all of them had been producing numbers like Survation then my guess that the impact could have been less.
We move on this week to the vital vote on TMay’s Queen’s speech and what has actually been agreed with the DUP.