Is Kemi Badenoch leading in the Conservative leadership contest?

Welcome to the 123rd edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP) which follows up last week’s dive into the history of Conservative leadership election polling with a look at the current contest.

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. (If you’re a free subscriber, sign up for a free trial here to see what you’re missing.)

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Is Kemi Badenoch in first place?

Pedantry first: the Conservative Party leadership election comes in phases, and before we get to votes among Conservative members there are votes among Conservative MPs. Currently being the most popular pick among members is not quite the same as being in first place, as you could be their top pick and still stumble out embarrassingly in the first round of (MP) voting ending up being even less of a party leader than I was.¹

That said, who among the candidates is currently in first place among the party’s members?

According to YouGov, it is Kemi Badenoch:

Aside from the usual caution about one poll only being one poll, the margins here are all relatively small (except between Stride and Badenoch). In the Sunak versus Truss contest, the final YouGov poll got the big picture right but even so had Truss on 66%, nine points higher than her actual result. Knock nine points off Badenoch, for example, and redistribute that to some of the others, and it could look a different race.

Her eight point lead, then, should be treated with much more caution than an eight point lead for a party in national voting intention polls, for example. Plus party leadership polls are harder to get right than general election voting intention ones. (Both weighting and turnout modelling are harder in leadership races, and indeed often not done in leadership race polling, because of the shortage of information compared with public elections.)²

Luckily, the YouGov poll is not the only data we have.

Unluckily, some of the other data is less than high quality. Including, as I previously reported:

This week’s mild stare of disapproval goes to the Daily Telegraph for reporting an open access, unrepresentative online vote on its own website as an “exclusive Telegraph poll” of the Conservative leadership election.

For better quality data, we also have a Teche poll of Conservative members. While their first poll in the Sunak versus Truss contest looked to be significantly off, their final poll was much closer to the end result. It has Truss on 64%, so two points lower than YouGov even if still seven points too high.³

Although the poll was commissioned by the James Cleverly camp, and likely would not have become public had it not suited his campaign, the basic pattern for reputable pollsters is for the client not to diminish the quality of the poll.

It gave a very different picture from YouGov:

JL Partners has not (yet?) got a similar poll, though they did a series of head-to-head polling tests back in June. But we do have another reputable source of data, even if not a full formal poll.

That is ConservativeHome whose surveys I dug into last week. As I concluded:

Three contests, three times got the winner right. That’s a good record for those ConHome surveys and on leads the surveys have been only a bit less accurate than proper polls.

Their final surveys were, though, too high on support for both Johnson (by 7 points) and Truss (by 11 points). So if there is another ballot of party members comprised of a ‘populist’ versus ‘technocratic’ contest, and especially if it is looking closer than those above, that is an important caveat to bear in mind.

What then do their latest figures for this time say?

As with YouGov, Badenoch is out in front. As with YouGov too, the top two with Techne - Cleverly and Patel - are well back. Beyond that though there is plenty of detailed difference from YouGov, and especially from Techne.

The one thing they are all agreed on is that Stride is last, and well behind.

We do have another piece of data, though it’s not clear how reputable it is: a survey of Conservative members from the Popular Conservatives.⁴

The ConHome surveys show why we should not be immediately dismissive of something that is not a ‘proper poll’ but this survey does not come with the methodological detail or track record that gives the ConHome data a leg up on the ladder of respectability.

For the Popular Conservatives, they have Jernick and Badenoch tied on 28% (including don’t knows) and with Stride last again.

So is Kemi Badenoch in the lead?

With a reputable poll and a reputable survey both saying yes, along with a survey of unknown quality putting her tied up front, that is enough to outweigh a reputable poll saying no.

So yes, probably. And Stride is almost certainly last.

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Voting intentions and leadership ratings

A thin table so far as I have reset it to include only post-general election voting intention polls:

Here too is a summary of the the leadership ratings, which vary a lot depending on the wording but overall patterns are consistent:

For more details, and updates as each new poll comes out, see my regularly updated tables here.

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

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Last week’s edition

How accurate are the ConservativeHome leadership election surveys?

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The unpopular but little noticed Labour policy, 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.