Rishi Sunak vs Liz Truss: how do the polls compare?
Welcome to the 100th edition of The Week in Polls, which takes a look at the increasing chatter that the Conservatives are now back down to Liz Truss levels in the polls. What does the data say?
Then it’s a look at the latest voting intention polls 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.)
But first, a glare of disapproval in the direction of the Evening Standard for writing that “getting an NHS dentist appointment is spiralling up voters’ concerns”, based on the result of a solitary focus group (and in so doing going further than even the person running the group did). Though at least the original headline was improved.
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Are things getting as bad again for the Conservatives as they were under Liz Truss?
There is already an old joke among followers of political polls that in the future anyone looking at a graph of polling data including Liz Truss’s brief sojourn as PM in September and October 2022 will scurry to check the original data as the lines from her time in charge will look so strange that the person will think they must be wrong.
And yet, while at first it appeared to those on all political sides that the Truss era was a low from which the Conservatives would recover, the question only being how far, there are now increasing comments that the Conservatives have slipped back to doing as badly once again.
What’s the full picture? Let’s grab some data and find out.
Voting intention
Liz Truss announced her resignation on 20 October 2022. Polls with fieldwork fully completed during the 10 days prior to that had her party on between 19% and 28%, with a Labour lead varying from 21% and 36%.
Polls fully completely in the last 10 days now put the Conservatives on between 19% and 26%, i.e. pretty much the same low, though with Labour’s lead lower, varying between 16% and 26%. The difference in lead is mostly down to Reform having picked up in the polls, so while the Conservatives are no more popular now than then, the Labour lead is generally smaller.
To give this some historic context, the previous all-time worst general election result for the Conservatives was 29% with the Duke of Wellington in 1832, so long ago that voters didn’t have letterboxes back then.1 Under both Truss and now Sunak the Conservatives are doing worse than that.
Of course, they also hit a similar low in 2019, before going on to win a general election - although that required dropping Theresa May and replacing her with Boris Johnson.
(Spare a thought for Iain Duncan Smith. He was ousted for being a disastrously unsuccessful party leader at a point when the Conservatives were on 33%-35% in the polls, with a Labour lead of 3%-5%.2 That would now count as remarkably good recovery for the Conservatives.)
Leader and party favourability
Sunak’s own favourability is significantly better than Truss’s was. But it’s heavily negative, a long way behind Starmer and has been falling.
His party’s favourability is pretty much where it was when Truss went, though the gap to Labour has decreased a little as Labour’s net favourability has fallen.
Government approval
As these YouGov figures show, Sunak’s government is doing about a dozen points better than the absolute worse under Truss, but its figures are still massively negative and there’s no sign of recovery in them. If anything, most recently they’ve started deteriorating again.
The economy
What about the issue that’s normally central to determining the fate of a government, the economy?
The Truss effect is easy to spot on this YouGov graph, leading to an historically rare run of Labour being consistently ahead of the Conservatives on the economy. Though the size of the gap decline after the Truss bump, Labour is still head and the Conservative ratings have been flat.
The NHS
What about the other issue that regularly tops voters’ concerns, the NHS?
Although this a polling question where Labour usually does better than on the economy, the overall pattern is similar: decline under Boris Johnson after his election win, a Liz Truss spike and then things fairly static at poor levels under Rishi Sunak.
(I’ve written before in detail about polling on immigration and so won’t repeat that here. It’s arguable that the Conservatives have, politically, been more successful on immigration in that their hoped-for focus on the issue has seen it rise in the list of the public’s concerns. This however hasn’t resulted in the public thinking the party is any better at dealing with the issue. The net result therefore has most likely been to boost defections to Reform by drawing more attention to an issue it isn’t rated well on.)
Direction of the country
Different question, different pollster, same story:3
Propensity to vote Conservative
Finally, one more graph from YouGov on a question that I really like yet which doesn’t get much attention. Rather than voting intention, this question asks people to put their chance of voting for a party on a 0-10 scale giving a more nuanced picture of a party’s overall standing with the public.
The story with this graph is a long decline under Boris Johnson, a bit of a quiver under Truss and then flatlining at a level well below those election-winning days of late 2019.
I’ve left this graph to last as it summarises the overall story of the last five years so well: a recovery under Johnson in 2019 leading to an election win, a long decline (slowed down by the peak COVID crisis times), a stumble further down under Truss and then not much of a recovery under Sunak.
Overall, the picture for Sunak and the Conservatives is a little better than at the Truss nadir. But only a little and with few signs of things headed in the right direction.
Moreover, I think the political challenge for the Conservatives is tougher now. Then, it seemed like a fair amount of the political problem was about the leader, and so changing leader might fix things. Now, the prospect of a leader change leading to improvement seems less likely, though at the current polling levels, perhaps that would be the right gamble to take?
National voting intention polls
This week’s YouGov poll grabbed plenty of attention for having only a four-point gap between the Conservatives and Reform (19% versus 15%), but that is the outlier compared with other polls. However, even the pollster with the biggest recent gap (a 15-pointer) is still showing the Conservatives stuck in the mid-twenties and a long way behind Labour. Conservative Home has an interesting piece on this: What if the polls are right?
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
Lee Anderson, the polls and the mundane reality.
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Are the leaders of both the Conservatives and Reform getting Reform voters wrong? And other polling news
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