Seventeen weeks to go
In the first week back there have been seven polls. The regular weekly Ashcroft poll hasn't fired up yet, and none of the phone pollsters did fieldwork over the first weekend of the year, but the daily YouGov and twice-weekly Populus polls are off:
Opinium/Observer (2/1/15) - CON 32%, LAB 33%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 17%, GRN 4% Populus (4/1/15) - CON 34%, LAB 35%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 12%, GRN 5% YouGov/Sun (5/1/15) - CON 31%, LAB 34%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 14%, GRN 8% YouGov/Sun (6/1/15) - CON 33%, LAB 33%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 13%, GRN 8% YouGov/Sun (7/1/15) - CON 32%, LAB 33%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 15%, GRN 7% YouGov/Sun (8/1/15) - CON 33%, LAB 33%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%, GRN 7% Populus (8/1/15) - CON 33%, LAB 34%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 14%, GRN 6%
All the polls so far are showing a tight race, with the Labour party averaging a very small lead - the current UKPollingReport average has CON 33%, LAB 34%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 14%, GRN 6%. YouGov started the year by changing their methodology to include UKIP in the main prompt, but it doesn't appear to have had any impact on their level of support (if anything they are marginally down - last month YouGov had them averaging at 15%).
Start of the Campaign
The political parties started the campaign, the Conservatives largely on the economy and spending, Labour on the NHS. In terms of believability at least Labour's claims went down better - by 48% to 32% people thought the claim that the NHS could not survive five more years of David Cameron was true, and by 42% to 27% that the claim the Tories wanted to cut spending back to 1930s levels was true. For the Conservatives, by 33% to 22% people believed that Labour had made £20 bn of unfunded spending commitments, but their claim that they had reduced the deficit by half was disbelieved by 49% to 24%.
Those, of course, are responses when respondents are prodded and forced to consider some party political claims and have an opinion. Whether anyone actually noticed or cared and whether anything made any difference is a different matter. I doubt we will see much change in the positions at the start of the week when the Conservatives led Labour on the economy by 15 percentage points, and Labour led the Conservatives by 12 points on the NHS, little different from other issue polls over recent months. Where there has been a significant change in the salience of issues. Presumably on the back of headlines about A&E waiting times and crisis in the NHS the proportion of people saying that health is one of the main issues facing the country has risen to 46%, in third place behind the economy and immigration and up 13 points since December. If health remains high on the agenda it will be good for Labour.
OfCom major parties
As I wrote about yesterday, Ofcom released their draft guidance on which parties should be treated as major parties in terms of election coverage. It's open for consultation so may yet change, but as things stand UKIP will be treated as a major party (meaning broadcasters will have to give due weight to reporting them in editorial coverage), the Green party will not.
Projections
Latest projections from Election Forecast (Chris Henretty et al's project), Election Etc (Steve Fisher's project) and the New Statesman's May2015 site are below. All are predicting a hung Parliament, all with Labour and Conservative within 10 seats of each other. Note that Steve Fisher's method doesn't have anyway of factoring in the SNP yet, so will change very soon. I think we should also be getting a regular seat projection from the Polling Observatory team in the next week or two.
Election Forecast - Hung Parliament, CON 284, LAB 281, LD 26, SNP 34, UKIP 3 Elections Etc - Hung Parliament, CON 294, LAB 297, LD 29, OTH 30 May 2015 - Hung Parliament, CON 273, LAB 281, LD 24, SNP 46, UKIP 3
