Do voting intention polls matter this early in a Parliament?

Welcome to the 131st edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which wonders whether my weekly table of Westminster Parliament voting intention polls is worth looking at.

Then it’s a summary of the latest national voting intention polls and a round-up of party leader ratings, followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis.

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If you’re not yet a paid-for subscriber, sign up now for a free trial to see what you’re missing:

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Finally, before we get to the main business, this week’s sigh of disappointment is generated by Matt Goodwin, whose polling at the general election was the least accurate and who now urges people to vote in and retweet a Twitter poll on a subject which has plenty of good polling available. Good polling that gives a very different answer to his Twitter poll.

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Want to know more about political polling? Get my book Polling UnPacked: the history, uses and abuses of political opinion polling.

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Do the national voting intention figures matter at the moment?

It is to the credit of pollsters that many of them at the moment warn people off paying much attention to national voting intention figures about a hypothetical Westminster general election. After all, a cynic would expect people with a product to sell to talk up how important it is.

It is also my impression that pollsters are keener to say ‘don’t pay too much attention to the most high profile thing we do’ in the immediate aftermath of this election than after previous elections.

That is despite the fact that this time around the voting intention polls performed pretty well. It’s been, to my eyes and ears at least, a bit of an odd segue post-election from ‘hooray! our polls were pretty good’ to ‘hey! don’t pay too much attention to them’.

But odd or not, is that latter view right?

It is certainly true that the polling sector is still working through the right lessons from the general election, and how to adapt their approach in the light of the general over-estimate of the Labour vote in particular. Yet if you were paying attention to the polls before polling day, you would have got the right big picture about what was going to happen. So it would be odd to say that the polls were good enough then but are not good enough now.

Another possible reason not to pay attention to the national voting intention polls now is that we are only a few months into a Parliament that could last five years.

But that is to miss three important points.

First, because we have polls from early in other Parliaments, there is a useful yardstick by which to measure the early polls in this Parliament. What that tells us is that both Labour and the Conservatives are doing historically poorly for a government or main opposition at this stage in a Parliament.

That trend is not destiny. Indeed, the one government that did worse this early was Margaret Thatcher’s after the 1979 election, and her party went on to win a further three general elections.¹ Even so, it does tell us something about where the public is and about what politics might look like.

Second, because polls are rather like a company’s share price, an analogy used by George Osborne and others. (I am not sure who first used it. If you know, please do let me know.) That is, they are both a short term public measure of how things are going. Longer term fundamentals may get obscured by too much focus on the short term public measure and its volatility. Yet also there is a substantive impact if that short term measure plummets - neither companies nor parties nor governments can close their minds, cordon off their morale and isolate their nerves completely from the numbers heading down. Bad numbers have a real world impact.

Third, the next general election may be, most likely, four or so years away. But the next election is not. In particular, there is a big round of local elections coming up in May, only 193 days away.² (And less if you are not reading this the day I hit send.)

Aside from their own inherent importance, they will be a big political moment. A big electoral test for the new Conservative leader. A big test for Nigel Farage’s talk of building up a grassroots organisation for Reform. A big test for the Prime Minister, and so on. Moreover, depending on the vagaries of Parliamentary by-elections, those May elections may well be the first big electoral test of all those things too. The coverage of the local elections will be full of their national implications.

Now, it is true that national voting intention polls are not local election polls. But we have very few of the latter and the broad picture from the former does have form for telling us roughly what the local election results will be like. Governments well down in the national voting intention polls, for example, get tanked at the local elections.

So yes, let’s as ever remember the caveats about the polls, and yes, let’s remember the value in polling questions other than those asking about voting intention.

But yes too, let’s carry on paying attention to the vote share figures.

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Voting intentions and leadership ratings

Here are the latest national general election voting intention polls, sorted by fieldwork dates:

Next, a summary of the the leadership ratings, sorted by name of pollster:

For more details, and updates as each new poll comes out, see my regularly updated tables here and follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.

For the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.

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Last week’s edition

The attitudes of Britain’s ethnic minority population.

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Robert Jenrick boasts about how the Tories would get 23% under him, and other polling news

The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are for paying subscribers only, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.