Probably the biggest Westminster by-election shock of recent times was the failure by LAB to take Boris Johnson’s old seat at Uxbridge in the July contest. What we saw there was a foretaste of how the Tories will play the general election. They’ll have different versions of a local issue like ULEZ each day over the five weeks. My main conclusion is that marginal seat by marginal seat the Tories are going to be harder to beat than current polling…
One of the biggest challenges about forecasting the next election is the very high proportion of 2019 Conservative voters who are now saying don’t know. What’s important about this group is that they are not saying they will not vote in the next election but only a relatively small proportion of them have actually switched to Labour. If the polls do get it wrong next time then it will be the Tory don’t knows who are responsible. Mike Smithson
This morning sees what are probably the worst front pages for the Tories for a month or so. At the same time the latest R&W poll has just about the biggest “best PM” lead for Starmer that we have seen. The Tories start to look like a party that is tired of being in power and is preparing for opposition. The big question that will increasingly dominate the political conversation is when the general election will be? My view has…
We are starting to hear calls for the Labour and Lib Dem parties to agree on a single Anti -Tory candidate for the mid-Beds by-election. This, of course, has been created by the resignation of Nadine Dorries On the face of it this seems a logical suggestion but it is hard to see Labour and the LDs agreeing on a deal. Starmer’s party would argue that it came second in the seat at the general election and would therefore stand…
Each month David Cowling, ITN’s former Head of Political Research, issues his polling averages table and as can be seen seen it is hard to discern any real change. This stability is helped, of course, by the fact that this is an average Perhaps this is why voting intention polls are getting so little attention and why hardly anybody talks about “the polls”. I cannot remember when a poll was featured on the front page of a paper but things…
You would have thought that someone who has risen to the top in politics would have a greater sense of self-awareness than that which we see from Sunak week after week after week. His constant boasting about how well he and his government are so out of kilter with what the public actually thinks that he is doing himself a huge amount of damage. It is not helping his party electorally and it is hard to see him having any…
What’s happened to the “Brexit Glue”? We have gone on for so long seeing the referendum vote as the great divider that it comes as something a shock to see polling like that in the Tweet above that was published during the week. Terms like “Red Wall” have entered the political vocabulary and it is going to be hard to accept that this doesn’t matter to the same extent anymore. It is important to recall that GE2019 took place before…