YouGov/Spectator AV polling

Anthony Wells

— 1 min read
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A quick couple of posts to catch up with a couple of things I should have posted about during the week but didn't get round to.

First, the Speccy this week has the results of a YouGov poll on voting intention in a general election fought under AV. This is a repeat of the questions asked by YouGov for Channel 4 at the start of the week, but carried out this week (the Channel Four polling was conducted about a fortnight ago). The big picture remains the same - Labour voters have become far less likely to give their second prefereces to the Lib Dems than they said they were at the time of the last election, Lib Dem voters are now as likely to give their second preferences to the Conservatives as Labour.

As a crude rule of thumb, how Lib Dem voters split determines how AV affects Lab -v- Con seats, and how likely Labour or Conservative voters are to back the Lib Dems determines whether the Lib Dems gain more from AV in their Con -v- LD margins or their Lab -v- LD marginals.

In this commentary on the YouGov website I've made some projections of what the result would be in a general election now with FPTP or with AV. On first past the post (using vote shares of CON 41%, LAB 35%, LDEM 16% - the normal YouGov voting intention that day), the Conservatives would win 320 seats, Labour 280 seats and the Lib Dems just 24. In contrast, with AV the result would be Conservative 309 (11 fewer), Labour 273 (7 fewer), Lib Dem 43% (19 more).

As I mention in the article, this is a very crude projection at the moment because we don't have the data to factor in minor parties. In particular, it won't be much good in Scotland or Wales because we don't have the data to judge how votes will transfer to and from the SNP and Plaid. Still, it's a start, and it suggests that there will not be a vast difference between the number of seats Labour and the Conservatives loose under AV now that Conservative and Lib Dem voters have become more likely to exchange second preferences (if that tendency grew stronger, we could even reach a point where AV actually helped the Conservatives).

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