(Some) good news for the Conservatives in the polls

Welcome to the 97th edition of The Week in Polls, which rises to the challenge of trying to find good news for the Conservatives in the polls.

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.)

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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Hunting for good news for the Conservatives

Every now and again a reader responds objecting to the negative picture of the Conservative Party’s poll standing regularly painted in this newsletter. The simple, glib response is to say they should take that up with Rishi Sunak, not me.

But a better response is to acknowledge both that continually telling the same story can be boring,¹ and also that there’s a risk of groupthink and myopia. So this time I’ve gone hunting for a third piece of possible good news for the Conservatives in the polls.

I say third as two have already been covered, both in previous editions and by others: whether there is hope for the Conservatives in the don’t knows and the fact that away from voting intention, polling figures for Labour and for Starmer are often rather lukewarm. (Something that YouGov returned to this week, pointing out that only a quarter - 26% - think a Labour government would do a good job.²)

Here’s the best I could find on my psephological hunt, courtesy of a Deltapoll survey for Channel 4:

Particularly given that people were prompted to select up to three choices, that only a third (32%) picked the current government as being to blame for the current recession shows that not all of the Teflon-like qualities of the Conservatives earlier in this Parliament have disappeared.

During the early stages of this Parliament, and the Covid crisis, many voters were willing to give the government, and Boris Johnson, the benefit of the doubt. Even if they thought he was messing up, many didn’t hold it too much against him given the struggles governments all around the world faced. Public mood did then of course change markedly, but for a while the Conservatives and the PM were riding high in the polls, and in election results.

That Deltapoll finding suggests that maybe - just maybe - there is a similar vein of generosity from the public which the Conservatives could once again tap into. The current administration is not - yet at least - being that heavily blamed for the recession.

If it can show that it is dealing with it effectively, fairly and with a focus on what matters most to voters, then perhaps there is some hope there for them?

Myself, I doubt it, but we’ll see and if I’m wrong, it’s very likely that poll findings like this one are what will seem in hindsight as having been crucial clues for what was to come.

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National voting intention polls

You know the score well by now: insert here references to Michael Foot, the Duke of Wellington and how long it it since the Conservatives were last on more than 30%.

For a new twist, wonder what will come first: another poll putting the Conservatives on under 20 or one putting them on more than 30?

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.

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Last week’s edition

Did a famous TV show get it right about opinion polls?

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Reform underperforms - 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.