The first sign that Boris Johnson is going to repeat Theresa May’s dire campaign performance at GE2017?

The first sign that Boris Johnson is going to repeat Theresa May’s dire campaign performance at GE2017?

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Corbyn reducing the PM’s net approval ratings lead by 23 points in a week is a worrying sign for Boris Johnson.

Longstanding readers of PB will know that leadership ratings are a much better predictor of electoral outcomes than headline voting intention figures, they foretold the unexpected Conservative majorities of 1992 and 2015. The 2017 ratings were also an indicator that Mrs May was about to squander David Cameron’s majority.

From this piece I wrote in the final weekend before the 2017 general election I looked at Mrs May’s collapsing ratings saying it should alarm Conservatives of which the YouGov figures were indicative of all the pollsters.

Boris Johnson must hope these Deltapoll findings are an outlier and not a harbinger, nearly halving a 47 point lead in the space of a week is not the sign of him winning over the voters he needs to win a majority. In a week Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have received a lot of coverage thanks to the debates the more people see Boris Johnson the less they like him, with the reverse situation for Corbyn?

We should be getting the Ipsos MORI ratings in the next few days, these are considered the gold standard because they’ve been polling since the 1970s and it allows to put the current figures into context. If Ipsos MORI show something to Deltapoll then it really will be déjà vu all over again.

The only real game changers I can see left are if it turns out Nick Timothy has once again written the Conservative Party manifesto or Donald Trump making a decisive intervention during his visit to the UK next month before the general election. The one thing I feel confident in saying and betting on is that Donald Trump will not be circumspect during his visit.

TSE

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