Despite all the chaos and division of the last two months, Labour are just four points ahead in the latest poll out this morning. The Tories have bottomed out on 34% to Labour’s 38%. The LibDems are on 11% and the Greens on 7%. It’s interesting to note with this poll that Kantar don’t offer a ‘Don’t know’ option, meaning it more accurately shows how, when pushed, Tory voters are sticking with the party rather than switching to Labour.
“In our view it is unlikely that such a large proportion of Conservative 2019 voters would choose not to vote in the next General Election, or that they will turn out at a lower rate than 2019 Labour voters.
For context, analysis of the 2019 post-election British Election Study shows that c.90% of both 2017 Conservative voters and 2017 Labour voters went on to vote in the 2019 General Election. In contrast, in our poll, we see no difference in such survival rates between 2019 Conservative and Labour voters. This, on its own, means a smaller Labour lead than other pollsters are showing.”
While we await Gray’s report, it gives Tory MPs something to ponder with more rational heads…
New Kantar polling published this morning has found that the Tories continue to surge upwards, hitting 50% for the first time in three years. As YouGov’s Chris Curtis points out, between the 2015 election and now, the Conservatives have polled at every single integer between 17% and 50%…
The poll, fieldwork for which continued to be carried out until Monday, also found that 47% of Brits think that the UK government is handling the Coronavirus outbreak very or fairly well, compared to 33% who think it is being handled very or fairly poorly. It remains to be seen if these numbers will hold as the virus spreads across the country…
On Brexit, the poll finds that “if the general economic situation turned out to be a lot worse after Brexit”, just 27% think the UK should consider re-joining, compared to 35% who think it should not. For all the good polling news for Boris, he’s still yet to overtake Margaret Thatcher’s polling peak of 52% in May 1983…
