Polling in the coming weeks
Opinion polls are a little light at the moment, and probably will be for the next few weeks. Even at the best of times there is little polling in the weeks immediately following a general election - we've just had an actual general election to judge people's voting behaviour, attention is elsewhere and newspapers will generally have blown their polling budgets in the campaign. I'd expect even less polling over the next few weeks because of the errors in the polls at the general election. Some of the long running trackers like the ICM/Guardian series and MORI political monitor will likely continue just to avoid a gap in the data series, but generally speaking most of the regular polls will probably pause for a bit while they work out what went wrong and sort out solutions to it.
As it is, the next political events we have too look forward to aren't about Great Britain anyway, but the Scottish, Welsh and London elections next year - I'm sure polling on them will start firing up in the next few months. The other, more immediate, race is the Labour leadership election.
We have had a little polling on that already - the YouGov/Sunday Times poll at the weekend (results here) asked the general public their preferences for Labour leader. Chuka Umunna came first on 17% (fieldwork was conducted before he withdrew), followed by Andy Burnham on 14%, Yvette Cooper on 8%, Tristram Hunt on 3%,
Liz Kendall on 2% and Mary Creagh on 1%. Amongst Labour's own voters Andy Burnham was ahead on 22%, with Chuka Umunna on 19%.
Obviously the key conclusion here isn't really who is ahead... it's how low anyone's figures are. 55% of the general public said don't know, 40% of Labour voters said don't know. YouGov also asked separately about if people thought each of the contenders would make a good or bad leader, and in each case a clear majority of respondents said they didn't know or didn't know enough about the person to say. This is a race where the public simply aren't familiar with the personalities of the candidates to have any clear opinion yet. That's not necessarily a bad thing for the next Labour leader - the public having no clear image of you is better than having negative baggage - it just means they need to be pretty careful to make sure people's first impressions are good ones, as they are difficult to shift once the public have formed an impression.
On the other outstanding issue - what caused the polling error - I'm beavering away at looking at what caused the errors and how to put them right, as I am sure are the other companies. I'm not planning on giving a running commentary, though I gave some thoughts at the end of last week on Keiran Pedley's Polling Matter's podcast here.
