Friday round up
This morning's daily YouGov poll for the Sun had topline voting intention figures of CON 32%, LAB 39%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 12%. Full tabs are here.
YouGov also repeated their own question on who would make the best Chancellor, and found Osborne only narrowly ahead of Ed Balls, 28% for Osborne, 26% for Balls. This, I hasten to add, isn't really any different from the picture MORI showed earlier in the week. Considering both polls have a margin of error of around about 3 points, the truth is a small lead either way doesn't matter: both companies show Osborne and Balls pretty evenly matched in terms of public preferences.
YouGov also asked about the proposed cap on benefit spending, and found 57% thought a cap on benefits should NOT include pensions. As one might expect, the group most opposed was over 60s, though technically they are a group that probably be unaffected, given Labour have said they would honour the triple lock on pensions, and any savings there might instead come from changing the retirement age - however, as is so often the case, its not so much the facts of policies that determine people's opinions as broad impressions, not least because most will be unaware of the facts.
Earlier today Populus also released the results of their weekly open-ended question on what news stories people have spotted. Questions like this are most interesting not when they show people picking up a story, but for the way they underline how few people pay attention to other stories. It's been a relatively quiet news week, so even what I suppose count as the biggest political stories were hardly noticed at all. The most spotted story was actually the riots in Turkey, which 10% of people mentioned. The story about the NSA accessing data on emails and phone calls was recalled by just 6% of people.
Labour's cap on the cost of benefits was not in the top ten stories people had noticed, implying less than 2% of people mentioned it. The fieldwork was done at the end of the week, so the weekend announcement was already a few days ago, but it still underlines just why what parties say and do often matters so little in terms of voting intention. Things don't make much of a difference, because no one is listening. That exaggerates its unimportance a little of course, as the policy foundations that parties sent down now will determine the battlegrounds closer to the election when people are paying at least a little more attention, but never forget that most of what goes on in politics completely bypasses the general public. So yes, people don't want a benefit cap to include pensions, but do most people know that the parties are proposing a total cap on benefits? Probably not. Did most people realise that Labour were proposing to include pensions in a cap? Probably not.
