What do Brexit voters think of Brexit?

Welcome to the latest edition of The Week in Polls, where this time I’m taking advantage of the fact that when newspapers write-up their own polls they often leave out some of the questions from their coverage: leaving the field free to newsletters like this one to dig out the polling tables and give you ‘exclusive’ new polling results.

In related news, LocalBase, my database of the headline results from each set of May local elections, has been updated. In some cases, the figures are significantly different from those on Wikipedia, but checking against a sample of contemporary newspaper accounts, I’m happy with the numbers I give. Corrections though always welcome.

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. If you’d like more news about the Lib Dems specifically, you can sign up for my monthly Liberal Democrat Newswire.

---

My privacy policy and related legal information is available here. Please note that if you are subscribed to other email lists of mine, unsubscribing from this list will not automatically remove you from the other lists. If you wish to be removed from all lists, simply hit reply and let me know.

---

What Leave voters think about how Brexit is going

Image by MasterTux from Pixabay.

This weekend saw a new poll appear from Opinium for The Observer. That’s doubly good news.

After rather a gap since the last one, Opinium is back and has confirmed it’ll be returning to fortnightly polls. Although we’re not short of voting intention polls overall (836 so far in this Parliament, more even than the number of members of the House of Lords), Opinium has an interestingly different methodology. So their polls add usefully to the diversity of evidence that polling provides.

The other reason it is good news is that these polls have more questions than most of the others. It’s increasingly common for national voting intention polls to ask little more than voting intention and the associated questions needed to weight those answers. Opinium’s polls for The Observer, however, have long lists of questions on news stories and policies, which also often go unreported in the newspaper’s own coverage. Which means, hooray, that Opinium serves up lots of fresh poll findings for the writers of email newsletters to discuss.

So let us dig into some data that the newspaper has passed up on covering itself. It is about Brexit.

The basic picture of polling about Brexit is that the public increasingly regrets it happening and increasingly views it as going badly. but support for rejoining the EU is much lower. I’ve covered plenty of polls on all three of those points in previous newsletters, so will skip the details this time. Suffice to say that broad picture is consistent across different pollsters and wording.

Why, though, might people think that something was a bad idea or is going badly but then not want to undo it? A simple analogy I use is to imagine someone quitting a job but then later regretting doing so. Some of the time, seeking to go back to the old job is the right move and one people seek. But often people may view the decision as one that can’t or shouldn’t be undone.

With Brexit, at the moment, there’s a bit more to it too. Let’s step through what Opinium found, zooming on (only) Leave voters:

How well or badly do you think Brexit has gone so far? 35% well - 51% badly

And has Brexit gone better or worse than you expected? 22% better than expected or expected it to go well and it has - 62% worse than expected or expected it to go badly and it has

So the typical Brexit voter thinks Brexit has gone badly so far, and that is as bad or worse than they feared it would be.

They aren’t impressed with how the government is handling things:

To what extent to you approve or disapprove of the way the government has handled the Brexit process? 27% approve - 45% disapprove

But perhaps that means that people are thinking ‘it’s going badly because the government is messing up, and it’ll all be ok if it got its act together’.

We also helpfully have this question:

Do you think Brexit has or has not affected you personally in any way? 24% negatively - 7% positively

Three quarters of Leave voters, therefore, don’t think they’ve been negatively impacted. Which makes it easier to be patient about sorting it out - and on that, there’s a fair degree of optimism among Leave voters:

Which of the following comes closest to your view? 56% The problems that have been caused so far by Brexit will be solved over time - 19% The problems that have been caused so far by Brexit will not be solved over time

That final 19% figure is perhaps the key: only one in five Leave voters think that there are problems caused by Brexit and that they won’t be sorted out in due course.

Which explains why some Leave voters may think it’s going badly, or even have been a mistake, but overall Leave voters aren’t rushing to wish to go as far as undoing it. That patience may increasingly fray, of course, if matters don’t improve. And if it does, the polls will be there to tell us.

---

National voting intention polls

Here’s the latest from each currently active pollster:

Hard to see any good news for the Conservatives in those figures. It may be rare for Labour to poll 50% or over, but it’s also rare for the government to poll 30% of higher. Being in the 40s is good enough for Labour to do well (perhaps even amazingly well). Being in the 20s isn’t enough for the Conservatives to avoid disaster.

For more details and updates through the week, see my daily updated table here.

Last week’s edition

Public opinion and the death penalty.

Know other people interested in political polling?

What the SNP’s own voters think of its approach to independence, and other insights from this week’s polling…