LabourList’s poll trends: Towards May 6th

By Theo Grzegorczyk

When LabourList first began publishing these polling trends, I suggested that one of the main arguments to support their publication was that it was necessary to look at the broader game. Among other reasons, I suggested that this was the case because “public opinion doesn’t change overnight on the back of a televised debate.”

Clearly, I’m eating those words. But I also argued that:

“All too often in Britain, our political culture gets caught up in the daily scuffles and the minor spats in Westminster, while failing to notice the larger trends at work in the country…There tends to be a round of commentary every night at about 10pm telling us that Labour has “plummeted” or that the Tories have “reversed the trend”. There are “nosedives” and “bounces” in the course of a week.”

I stand by that, and, true to form, the Sunday papers were yesterday gleefully predicting a collapse in Liberal support on the back of a few polls. There certainly has been a slight decrease in their poll numbers since their initial high. But whether or not this is in fact a true “collapse” is hard to gauge by looking at trends that place the current Lib Dem position in the context of where they were back in January.

I have therefore produced two different interpretations tonight, which tell two different stories. The first takes the same format as previous trends, and – with the addition of YouGov and ICM – shows no change in the final projections.

The second assumes – as I think many now do – that the electorate effectively hit the reset button after the first Prime Ministerial Debate, and therefore judges everything since then as a trend which acts independently of what came before.