How the MRPs did in the London council elections
Welcome to the 216th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), a polling newsletter that always welcomes new readers. So please don’t keep TWIP a secret; please share it with your friends and colleagues:
This time, I take a look at two further aspects of how the polls and predictions performed last month: the London MRPs and the Birmingham polls.
This is followed by a summary of the latest national voting intention polls, seat projections from MRPs and the most recent party leader ratings.
Subscribers who pay for the full edition can also read ten insights from the latest polls and analyses, including:
New polling from YouGov on Europe;
What Reform voters think of climate change; and
Leader approval ratings among trade union members.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can read all ten by starting a free trial now:
For more polling news as it comes in ahead of next week’s edition, you can also follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.
A quick pair of updates on two previous stories. First, after the Survation poll in Makerfield putting Andy Burnham three points in the lead, the pollster now has a new by-election poll, this time putting Burnham ten points ahead. Survation’s Damian Lyons Lowe, however, is not impressed with some of the media coverage.
Second, last week I shared analysis from Leonardo Carella of the Leave/Remain split among Conservative voters. He and I have had a follow-up discussion on Bluesky.
And with that, on with the show.
How the MRPs did in the London local elections
I’ve previously covered how the various projections for seat gains and losses in the English local council elections performed (with the table updated since being originally published), and last week’s 10 points included the Welsh and Scottish track records.
Time then to turn to the MRPs which projected vote shares (but not seat numbers) for various council elections.
Jenevieve Treadwell writes:
There were at least three MRPs just for London’s local elections this cycle — from YouGov, More in Common, and JL Partners … Vote share projections were broadly accurate … Each pollster’s “MAE” (mean absolute error), the average size of the error, is around 4pp. An MAE of 4pp means that, in a given borough, the pollster was off by about 4 percentage points on average.
I would put those results a notch lower than ‘broadly accurate’. Perhaps ‘decent’. Imagine an average error of 4 points for parties in a national voting intention poll. That could give you a very different picture from reality, even if it gets the very broad picture (which party is large? which party is small?) right
That said, local councils and local council elections do not get enough detailed attention from regional and national media. So the spread of such polling is welcome, and hopefully if it continues to spread, the extra experience can produce greater accuracy.
She then goes on to explain why, despite the polling being decent, the changes in seats (and council control) were less dramatic in London than many had expected. It’s all to do with how good (or bad) some parties were at turning votes into seats.
As she concludes:
A good election strategy can make a huge difference in a campaign. Targeting some areas (where you’re close second) at the expense of others, to redistribute resources and scrape a win. These choices over resources and priorities shape campaigns and are the lessons smaller parties need to learn to compete and grow.
Of course, Liberal Democrats have long prided themselves on getting such things right, and indeed the party’s number of councillors in London grew by a third, a significant growth that pundits had not predicted.1
Birmingham polling
Ahead of the local elections, I wrote:
My eyebrows have been kept raised by the ITV/More in Common poll for the local elections in Birmingham. More local election polling is good news. But ITV headlined on how many seats Labour are set to lose, with a calculation based on “a uniform swing model, applying changes in vote share evenly across all wards.” The impact of independent candidates, tactical voting, the evidence from recent elections… all subsumed by a uniform swing model. That is… brave.
It is only right therefore to return to the scene of the bravery and see how things worked out.
In the end, there were two such polls, the one which triggered the quote above, published on 15 April, and then one published on 6 May with all the alliterative media fanfare of it being “a bombshell Birmingham poll”.
That media coverage, as with the previous coverage, headlines on the projected council seat numbers. Here is how they stacked up against the results:
15 April: Ref 26, Ind: 1, Lab: 32, Grn: 7, Con: 25, Lib Dem: 10
6 May: Ref 47, Ind: 17, Lab: 14, Grn: 12, Con: 6, Lib Dem: 5
Reality: Ref 23, Ind: 13, Lab: 17, Grn: 19, Con: 16, Lib Dem: 12
I think it’s fair to say those projected seat figures were rather sub-optimal. The bombshell was way off target.
What about vote share?
We can compare the results against More in Common’s 6 May vote share figures (whose fieldwork was in April):
6 May: Ref 26%, Ind: 12%, Lab: 23%, Grn: 18%, Con: 15%, Lib Dem: 7%
Reality: Ref 20%, Ind: 10%, Lab: 20%, Grn: 21%, Con: 16%, Lib Dem: 11%2
That’s pretty decent - and I hope good enough to encourage both more council-level polling in future and, ahem, some work on seat projection models.
Hopefully it may also encourage the media to relearn a lesson or two about how to report polling. That ITV coverage was both welcome - council-level polling is a good thing to inform political coverage, which is rare enough about councils anyway - but it was also full of hostages to fortune, without the sort of caveats and caution that should have been there. Calling a poll a ‘bombshell’ poll, particularly in a social media post shorn of context, caveats or cautions, is always very risky given that, as Twyman’s Law3 puts it, the more unusual or interesting the data, the more likely the results are to have been the result of an error.
One of the ITV stories did, to be fair, have buried deep in it the warning that “This result is radical and should be taken with a pinch of salt.” But that was not the tone of the social media sharing, the headline or the early sections of the story (such as “devastating prediction”), all the parts that many people will have seen without getting to that warning.
The vote shares were pretty decent, the seat projections wayward and the media coverage can certainly be improved on.
Will Labour close the ‘Trump loophole’ in its political reform plans?
Labour wants to restrict the flow of foreign money into British politics. But here’s how Donald Trump, or Vladimir Putin or Elon Musk, could sidestep the government’s plans:
If you spot a factual error…
Borrowing an idea from Stuart Ritchie and others, if you spot a factual error in an edition of this newsletter, I will give you a free 12-month subscription to the paid-for version (or an extra 12 months on your existing one). Factual errors qualify; grammatical errors or disagreements over interpretation do not and my decision is final. Messages about both of those are always welcome, though.
Voting intention and leadership ratings
Here are the latest voting intention polls from different pollsters. We’ve now had three polls in a row showing Reform support rising, so it may be that they’ve turned the corner on their long slide in the polls. There have, though, been previous false dawns like this before, so let’s see.
The table is also online here, along with explanations about what is included. It is updated regularly through the week with new polls.
Next are the seat projections from MRPs, also sorted by fieldwork dates. Because they are published infrequently, most of these are somewhat dated.
Finally, here is a summary of the latest leadership ratings, sorted by pollster name.
The table is also online here with additional details and is updated regularly through the week as new data comes out.
For the historical figures on both voting intention and leader approval, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.
Catch up on the previous two editions
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New polling on Europe, and 9 other polling insights you shouldn’t miss
The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analyses are only for subscribers who pay for the full edition, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.
YouGov has updated its regular tracker polling on attitudes towards Britain’s relations with the European Union and it brings mixed news for pro-Europeans.
