What do the post-election polls tell us so far?

Welcome to the 118th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP) and yes, we’ve had enough polls in this new Parliament already to start talking about what they are telling us.

Then it’s a summary of the latest national 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.)

First though this week’s mild stare of disapproval goes to the team at the Daily Express for calling unweighted, unrepresentative online reader surveys about the Conservative leadership elections “polls”.

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The first post-election polling on the government

The pollsters are back at work and, at least as far as polling on voting intentions for future elections and closely related topics goes, we should be a bit careful about their figures until we’ve seen their election post-mortems and what methodology changes, if any, they are implementing as a result.

But as the polls were broadly correct, we don’t have to ignore the polls completely, and in particular those that show us answers or patterns that are not dependent on a few points here or there.

Government approval

We have one set of data so far, from Ipsos, showing 34%-16% agreement that the government is doing well rather than badly so far.

That net +18 varies considerably depending on who people voted for in the general election: +62 for Labour voters, +35 for Lib Dems, +2 for Conservatives and -10 for others.

The question wording is not the same as for Ipsos’s standard very long-running data set, so we can’t compare these results with those for previous cycles, though the figures are much better than the various times something very similar to this wording (read on for more on that wording change) was used in the last Parliament:

Leader approval

We have data from three pollsters, YouGov, Ipsos and Opinium, asking about a range of party leaders.¹

YouGov has Ed Davey on top with +5 net approval, ahead of Starmer on -3, the Green leaders on -3 and -7, Farage on -38 and Sunak on -47.

That -3 for Starmer may seem on the low side, but compares well with history: it was -11 for Boris Johnson in the comparable poll using the same wording after the 2019 election and -34 for Theresa May after 2017.²

Ipsos, with different wording (and showing once again how much leader approval ratings vary depending on the wording) has Starmer on +7, Davey on +3, Farage on -26 and Suank on -36.

That +7 for Starmer again compares well with history: it was -8 for Boris Johnson after 2019.

Opinium has a similar picture with Starmer on +19, Davey on +8, the Green leaders jointly on +6 and Sunak on -22. (Farage not included in the questions.)

The historical comparison again serves Starmer well, with it having been +7 for Boris Johnson in the first Opinium poll after the 2019 election and -20 for Theresa May after the 2017 election.

Although I was technically joint Lib Dem leader at the time of those YouGov, Ipsos and Opinium polls, my blushes and your derision are spared by them not having polled an approval rating for me.

The King’s Speech

Polling on the individual policies in a package - whether a manifesto, Budget or new legislative programme - is of limited use. Often the public’s verdict on the whole is not the sum of its views on the parts, and anyway its views on the parts is often more a view of the government rather than the parts themselves (i.e. people can like a government’s policies because they like the government.)

All that said, the relative ratings at least for policies can be instructive, so here’s the YouGov polling on the King’s Speech:

Notable how poorly the football regulator policy fares (though I wonder how many people know much about the policy and are interpreting the question as ‘should the government create another bit of the state?’).

Notable too how relatively popular is continuing with Rishi Sunak’s progressive smoking ban.

Polling pedantry news

WeThink has clarified that its national opinion polls are for GB rather than UK, i.e. excluding Northern Ireland. This is what most, though not all, pollsters do but due to a website error WeThink’s polls had been appearing labelled UK. (The next version of PollBase will be corrected.)

This matters a little if you are, for example, comparing the accuracy of WeThink’s final pre-election poll with reality as the right yardstick therefore is the GB vote shares rather than the UK ones.

In other polling pedantry news, Ipsos has slightly changed the wording of one of its leadership approval questions, from “To what extent, would you say X has done a good job or bad job as Y, or neither?” to “To what extent, would you say X has been doing a good job or bad job as Y, or neither?” There is a similar ‘has done’ to ‘is doing’ change for one of their government approval questions too.

Fair to say that’s unlikely to make a big difference to the figures, though a shame that annoying first comma didn’t get an axe in this change.

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National voting intention polls

A thin table to begin the Parliament with as I’ve reset it to include only post-general election polls:

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

7 things we know about the Lib Dems, and 2 things we don’t.

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The exit’s polls accuracy - and rough edges, 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.