Unpopular populism: the new international trend?
Welcome to the 156th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP) which takes an international tour of three other countries to see how populists are faring.
Then it is 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 time, those ten include what the public thinks of a ‘buy British’ campaign in response to Donald Trump’s tariffs.
If you are not yet a paid-for subscriber, you can sign up for a free trial now to read that and all the other stories:
Before we get to that, a quick follow-up to last week’s edition about those pollsters who put Ed Davey in their poll questions but then don’t include the results for Ed Davey in their write-ups. More in Common’s Luke Tryl explains why he leaves Ed Davey out of their graphs here.
The latest quarterly update of Pollbase, with national voting intention polls going back to 1943 is now out. This time includes a bumper set of previously missing data from 1938-1992.
And with that, on with the show.
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Polling from the US, Canada and Australia
Donald Trump’s approval rating sinks
Here’s how the US President’s approval rating is doing over time and compared with previous Presidents:
If you want to be a downer on Trump, there is an easy story to tell from the data so far. His figures are underwater, they are sinking and not only only is he the only President in this history of polling to have negative ratings this far in, but also he has now done that twice. His party is on the same course as last time - which led to being mullered in the mid-term elections and then losing the Presidency.
Trump’s populism is turning out not to be so popular, again.
So far, so bad. But…
Trump is doing better (so far) than he did last time around. For all the dramatic graphs from the financial markets, there has been no Liz Truss-style collapse in his ratings. And remember how close that defeat in the Presidential contest was for Trump? Well, he is doing better than was doing last time around so really that next Presidential contest, whether with him or someone else, looks quite promising…
Take your pick which of those versions you find the more plausible.
Canadian Liberals are on a surge
But if you do want a graph with a dramatic trend, turn to Canada where there is a general election on 28 April:
Once the dust has settled on the Canadian contest, there will no doubt be much analysis about the extent to which the remarkable Liberal rebound was due to Justin Trudeau standing down for Mark Carney as their leader or due to Donald Trump.
However, it does now look like those post-mortems will happen under a re-elected Liberal government. And that once again the populist option - although the Canadian Conservatives have been backing away from their affection for Trump - will not be the popular one.
Australian Labor on the rebound
Also facing a general election soon is Australia, where on 3 May the incumbent Labor Prime Minister is hoping to see off a challenge from the Liberals (who are not Liberals in the Canadian or UK sense but rather the right-wing conservative party).
As in Canada, it was looking dicey for the incumbents until the trend took a bend:
In this case, it’s likely that is down to the Liberals focusing on fighting a conservative culture war rather than focusing on the issues that matter most to voters. Unpopular populism could be striking again - though the election is still looking very close.
What if…
It is possible that all three of these stories have the same next step: either populists triumphing (winning elections in Canada and Australia while Trump’s ratings plateau or even improve), or the populists having their unpopularity vividly demonstrated (losing those two elections and seeing Trump fall below even his first term ratings).
If it is a hattrick one way or the other, that would be quite the dramatic pattern for populists.
Voting intentions and leadership ratings
Here are the latest national general election voting intention polls, sorted by fieldwork dates.
There is scope for Liberal Democrats to get a little excited as the latest YouGov gives the party its highest rating since before the 2019 general election, while the latest More in Common and Techne scores are the best with each pollster since they started polling in the last Parliament. Find Out Now did not quite make it a quartet of best results, but was only 1 point short of hitting the same mark for the Lib Dems as More in Common and Techne.
Meanwhile, Reform’s rise in the polls has stalled, and even faded back a little.
For both parties, the local election results at the start of next month have significant potential to boost or deflate their standings, as we have seen in previous years.
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.
Catch-up: the previous two editions
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Is it good for a politician to be a safe pair of hands?, 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.
Do voters prefer a politician to be a safe pair of hands or someone willing to shake
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