How useful is Uniform National Swing (UNS)?

Welcome to the 140th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), the penultimate of the year and this time rather than forcing myself to choose between writing about only one of several new excellent pieces of analysis, I have gone for introducing you to all of them.

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.

This week, that includes wise words from

Rob Ford

on how to make political predictions.

But first, it is nearly Christmas! So here’s a little gift: sign up now for the paid-for version of this newsletter and get a whole 90 days for free. That will see you through to Spring!

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I hope all my readers have a great Christmas and I only hold off wishing you a happy new year as there is one more edition of 2024 to come. See you in your inbox next weekend.

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How useful is Uniform National Swing (UNS)?

Long-time readers will know my fondness of using UNS as a handy baseline for what changes in party support may mean. Apparently much cleverer calculations have often bombed and for the larger parties UNS has a pretty good track record of getting the overall picture right for larger parties.

Readers of Dylan Difford’s work, however, will know that he has a rather different take on the value of UNS. I think this is mostly a case of me seeing the UNS glass as half full and him seeing it as half empty, but it means I always read with interest his latest pronouncements on UNS.

His latest take came out in a social media thread this week:

Historically, UNS has typically been broadly accurate for the headline election result.

In 16 of the last 18 elections, it has projected the winner's seat share to within 4 points; in 10, to within 2 points. As recently as 2019, it projected the Tories to within five seats of their actual result.

Glass half full!

But he adds:

It has also had some clunkers, even before 2024's extreme aberration.

Had swing been uniform, the Tories would have won majorities in 1964 and Feb 1974, while also suffering notably fewer losses in 1992 and 1997.

Labour's Scottish losses in 2015 are also not captured by UNS…

There's also the problem with people using it to model individual seat results.

Without even touching vote share, it's not got a great record for seat winners. In the past 18 elections, it has incorrectly called 1 in 12 seats on average, rising to a high of 3 in 10 at the 2024 election.

As he concludes:

While UNS might usually hold up reasonably well nationally, it just cannot model constituency results and isn't designed to. Indeed, part of the reason it can usually get things broadly right in aggregate is that seats with above average swing typically balance those with below average swing.

That seems to me a pretty fair summary, though while he concludes that it “should not be treated as gospel”, I would conclude that it shows it is a useful starting point, though not if you want to predict Liberal Democrat results.

Racial fragmentation

James Kanagasooriam, Patrick Flynn and Manon Allen from Focaldata write in their latest newsletter:

A big public opinion mega-theme this year has been the phenomenon of ‘racial depolarisation’. Or [a decline in] the differences in how white and non-white voters think and vote…

In July, Labour suffered its worst result on record with non-white voters. Lots was made of the fact that Labour shed 28 points with Muslim voters, and an average of 18pp across all minority groups. Less was made, however, of the fact that many of these Labour votes were lent to other left-leaning parties, including the Greens and Lib Dems. Overall, this left-leaning ‘bloc’ achieved 66% among ethnic minorities compared to 26% for ‘right-leaning’ parties (Conservatives + Reform). The equivalent figures for white voters were 53% and 41%. We should not underestimate how poorly the right performs, and how well the left does, amongst minority groups.

However, the most interesting stories emerge when we pick out what is happening within groups. If there is anything driving this rapprochement, it’s a constellation of micro-stories that net out at the level of overall trend, but have very different drivers and features. For example, we found in our analysis that the political values of British Indians and British Chinese voters, and to a lesser extent British African voters, are very different to British Caribbeans and Muslims. The former are drifting to the right, the latter to the left. Depolarisation only appears to be happening in some places, for some people.

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Are we talking too much about TikTok?

Having indulged in the ‘will the 2024 election be the TikTok election?’ discourse myself, I was struck by how low the overall figures from YouGov are for people getting political news from it:

That 12% figure is certainly much higher among younger people, and so the overall figure may rise over time (if TikTok does not get banned/collapse/out of fashion).

But to put that 12% figure in context, it is slightly lower than the proportion of the population who live in London. Asking ‘will this be the London election?’ would sound - I think - weirdly insular and out of touch with where most voters are. And TikTok is smaller than that (along with being more evenly spread out across constituencies, which always reduces influence under first past the post).

A little bit of polling whimsy

And to round off this section:

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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 during the week 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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Catch-up: the previous two editions

The return of the don't knows?

Should Labour move to the right on immigration?

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What next for the Liberal Democrats?, 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.

1. I’ve co-authored with Jim Williams a pamphlet on what the polling and other