Peter McLeod

@mcleodp.bsky.social

130 Followers 243 Following

Opinion polls and focus groups, UK and elsewhere.

BBC News headline: Banksy confirms he's behind statue in central London
100 jumps "completed" screen, showing that the player achieved the goal after 74 attempts.
The Game Over screen of "100 jumps" showing that the player failed with only 1 jump left.
Scene from The Squid and the Whale, character describes Kafka's The Metamorphosis
"You might already be familiar with the problem of a party having policies that “poll well in isolation” while not adding up to an election-winning programme. Tackling the many interlocking challenges of how to build a deliverable policy programme that would make a real positive difference to people’s lives, is credible to voters, differentiates a party from its opponents, represents a set of values that target voters share, and reinforces a party’s brand strengths – in other words, that might actually win an election – would make for an impressive blog post. Sadly that’s not this one: for now I just want to focus on how you should interpret a poll that shows most people back a certain policy."
Text from blog, incl: "we should expect consolidation to take place on the right... [e.g.] a pact or alliance, as when the Brexit Party stood aside for the Tories in many seats at the 2019 election."
Keir Starmer stands at a lectern, the Stars and Stripes and Union Flag resplendent behind him. He frowns as he looks down at what we assume are his speaking notes. The on-screen subtitle reads: "there's a famous slogan in the United Kingdom".
Any of the following are more than plausible: right wing voters act tactically to get rid of a Labour government; the Tories collapse completely, leaving Reform to clean up; Reform collapses completely, to the Tories’ benefit; the right wing parties form a pact or alliance, as when the Brexit Party stood aside for the Tories in many seats at the 2019 election. Second, Labour pursuing a progressive alliance strategy would be a signal to right wing voters that it’s against them and their priorities, increasing the pressure for anti-government tactical voting.
At the 2024 election, the combined progressive vote was larger than the combined right wing vote in 416 of the 575 constituencies in England and Wales (I’m excluding Scotland from this simple analysis because the independence question complicates the progressive/right wing divide much more than in Wales). Applying a 7-point uniform swing from the progressive to the right-wing bloc shows that the right bloc is now bigger in 313 of them, with the progressive bloc falling to 262. That is to say, if voters in each bloc sort themselves perfectly to back the type of candidate they (theoretically) favour, the right is in touching distance of an overall majority in Parliament, regardless of what happens in Scotland.
It's often suggested that a) Labour is seeking to appease Reform voters while ignoring its own base, and b) that it should instead try to unite a progressive bloc of voters currently split between itself, the Greens, Lib Dems and nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. While I don’t think it’s strictly accurate that Labour’s main target is Reform voters, my main issue with this argument is that a progressive-voter strategy is set up to fail. This post aims to explain why.
Leslie Nielsen in "Airplane!"