More reasons to doubt that the don’t knows will rescue the Conservatives

Welcome to this week’s edition which this week returns to two topics from previous editions with new data: the don’t knows, and support for transgender rights.

But first, this week’s gentle sigh of exasperation at just how the public can be wrong about things is this poll from YouGov which shows 87% of people are wrong about what the numbers on the dials of normal toasters mean.¹

As ever, if you have any feedback or questions prompted by what follows, or spotted some other recent polling you’d like to see covered, just hit reply. I personally read every response.

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More reasons to doubt that the don’t knows will rescue the Conservatives

In the previous The Week in Polls I touched on how risky it is to think of those who answer voting intention questions from pollsters with ‘don’t know’ as an easy route back to popularity for the Conservatives. Just because many of them voted Conservative in 2019 doesn’t mean they’ll be relatively easy for the government to win back.

Now some new data about undecided voters from Redfield & Wilton reinforces that point:

That does not look like a pool of people who are likely to give the Conservatives a significant net boost in the polls as the election nears.

And all hail the 35% of don’t knows who really don’t know.

Women more supportive than men of transgender people

I have written before about how what the polls tell us about trans rights is rather different from the situation as portrayed by some media outlets and pundits:

[Some] claim that supporting trans rights is something imposed on women. That’s the tenor of Jenni Russell’s much discussed recent piece for The Times, headlined, “Starmer is taking 99.9% of women for fools”. Trans rights are presented as something supported by men, despite opposition from women.

Yet the polling tell us something very different. Let’s take the example of which toilets trans women should use.

More women support trans women using women’s toilets than oppose.

What’s more, support for trans women using women’s toilets is higher among women than men.

And to round it off, as the majority of people are women, what flows from the above is that the majority of supporters of trans women using women’s toilet are… women.

This applies on other aspects of trans rights too…

New polling from YouGov paints a similar picture, with women being more supportive of trans women than men are:

How positively or negatively would you say the following view transgender people?

You personally (women): 45% positive - 18% negative
You personally (men): 32% positive - 31% negative
You personally (overall): 39% positive - 25% negative

The age gradient is also striking, with 65% of 18-24s picking positive and that falling across each age band down to 23% for 65+.²

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National voting intention polls

An update on the Michael Foot yardstick: Rishi Sunak is 92% Michael Foot, i.e. 92% of the polls in the table below have the Conservatives doing the same or worse than Labour did in their 1983 landslide defeat (28%).

Here are the latest figures from each currently active pollster:

For more details and updates through the week, see my daily updated table here and for all the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.

Last week’s edition

What we don't know about don't knows.

Conservatives are keener on Net Zero than other people, and other polling news

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