What's the reality behind the big Daily Telegraph/MRP story of the week?

Welcome to the 91st edition of The Week in Polls, which digs into the big poll story of the week: that front page Daily Telegraph story about a new MRP survey from YouGov.

Then it’s the usual 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.

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What does the Daily Telegraph/YouGov MRP story tell us?

MRPs are the Toby Jones of political polling. They might be telling us what was already known, but they do so in such a vivid way that they grab the headlines, get the emotions moving and secure the attention of politicians.

Which is why a new MRP survey from YouGov this week got splashed on the front page of the Daily Telegraph even though what it found was really no different from what traditional national voting intention polls have already been telling us for a long time:

Or as the BBC quoted a Conservative MP saying:

Some of my colleagues seemingly didn't realise what the national polling means for them until they looked at their seat in the MRP.

So let’s run through what an MRP survey is, why it’s best to ignore much of the Daily Telegraph’s write-up, what the poll tells us, and how, perhaps surprisingly given the headlines allocated to the poll, it may turn out to be more optimistic for the Conservatives than we should expect an actual election to be.

What is MRP?

The short version is that an MRP is a combination of a large sample poll and clever modelling which allows you to come up with predictions for the result in each individual constituency. Those predictions can take into account differences between seats such as whether they are a marginal or a safe seat, whether it’s got an older or younger population that average, if it is in England, Scotland or Wales, and so on.

Not all MRPs are made equal. It’s a complicated methodology and different teams using MRP come up with different answers. My own view is that the YouGov MRP team and approach is one of the best. They stand up to scrutiny better than some of the MRPs I’ve looked at previously.

My MRP explainer goes into more detail, including the likely strengths and potential weaknesses of MRP models. The most relevant point for here is that there’s no particular reason to think they’ll be more accurate than traditional polls overall,¹ but when done well, an MRP should do better at picking out different patterns in different sorts of seats. Plus that list of individual seat predictions grabs the attention.

The two sorts of fools when it comes to MRPs are those at two extremes: those who treat them as gospel and those who think that their samples are too small to make seat-level predictions. Wise people steer clear of both.

Ignore the Daily Telegraph, but praise YouGov

For me, the most remarkable thing about the MRP is not the political picture it draws but the fact that the pollster behind it, YouGov, had within 24 hours put up a detailed account on its own website of several ways the Daily Telegraph had reported the poll either wrongly or dubiously.

It’s to YouGov’s credit that they did this, even if doing so perhaps was made easier by the poll having been commissioned not by the newspaper itself but by a group of unknown Conservative donors called the Conservative Britain Alliance.

YouGov pointed out that the newspaper had got its write-up of English and Welsh vote shares wrong - “this is not the correct way to look at either implied national changes nor what is happening at the constituency level”, that its comments on the impact of Reform were based on calculations that are “not a reliable way of measuring their impact” and that “the Daily Telegraph also said that the YouGov MRP model does not account for tactical voting in its estimated shares. This is not the case”.

Phew.

(And that’s without getting into the oddities in the paper’s follow-up coverage.)

Let’s move on what to what the poll itself said.

What the poll tells us

In votes:

Labour 39.5%
Conservatives 26%
Lib Dems 12.5%
Reform 9%
Greens 7.5%
SNP 3%
Plaid 0.5%
Labour lead: 13.5%

Or in seats:

Labour 385
Conservatives 169
Lib Dems 48
Reform 0
Greens 1
SNP 25
Plaid 3
Labour majority: 120

A big Labour majority, the Liberal Democrats back up to being the third largest party in the House of Commons and the Greens hanging on to a seat despite Caroline Lucas standing down.

That’s in line with what traditional national voting intention polls are telling us, with extra constituency detail that a good MRP should be able to provide.

Will reality be even worse for the Conservatives, or could it be better?

“In line” although also in some important respects better for the Conservatives than the traditional polls. Because look again at that Labour vote share: ‘only’ 39.5%, which is lower than the general picture in national polls.

That’s because this MRP took an approach to voters who said ‘don’t know’ that boosted the Conservative vote share by allocating voting intentions to don’t knows by matching them to similar voters who did give a voting intention. As most don’t knows look similar to Conservative voters, that gives the Conservative share a boost.

Then there’s a second reason to think that reality might turn out even worse for the Conservatives. That’s because despite those gruesome seat numbers for the Conservatives - 169 seats is only 4 better than John Major got in a slightly larger House of Commons² in 1997 - many of the individual constituency results show only limited anti-Conservative tactical voting.³

One of the YouGov big brains, Patrick English, has pointed out that the big changes to constituency boundaries for next time may hinder tactical voting. Yet the detailed constituency figures often show tactical voting pushes really flopping. It would be a surprise to see that given that, compared with 2019, there aren’t such complexities as Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity with many voters who otherwise also want to see the Conservatives out.

Another big brain, Owen Winter, has research showing how there is a cyclical pattern at work, with the vote shares for parties smoother mid-Parliament and then getting lumpier (i.e. more concentrated in some seats and more squeezed down in others) as an election nears. So we should expect YouGov’s MRP at the moment to show us less support for tactical voting than there will be by the time we get to real votes being cast. Whether YouGov’s MRPs get lumpier as the election nears is going to be a trend to watch.

However, there is also a factor that points the other way. As I wrote about last time, we should expect the polls to close somewhat. So perhaps reality will turn out better for the Conservatives.

What this YouGov MRP data does though confirm is that the sort of narrowing that might be expected if history turns out to be a decent guide is the sort of narrowing that would still leave the Conservatives on course for defeat. There’s no sign of a magic distribution of a low vote Conservative share that transforms it into a power-preserving seat total.

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National voting intention polls

The run continues of polls putting the Conservatives on 30% or less. They were last over 30% in June 2023.

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

How much will the polls close by (if at all)?

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Could Nigel Farage be elected in Clacton?, 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.