YouGov/Times - CON 48, LAB 29, LD 10, UKIP 5
The weekly YouGov poll for the Times this morning has topline figures of CON 48%, LAB 29%, LDEM 10%, UKIP 5%. The decline in the Tory lead in YouGov's polling seems to have abated, though the nineteen point lead is still smaller than the twenty-plus point leads we saw when the election was first announced.
Looking at the rest of the poll, the most interesting question there is about recall of election slogans and messages. For avid watchers of politics Theresa May's message discipline during the campaign has become something of a running joke, with people keeping count of how many times she manages to say "strong and stable". While this makes for boring coverage for political anoraks, its purpose is to get a message through to those ordinary voters who aren't addicted to 24 hour news. If you keep on hammering the same message in, eventually it will sink into people.
To test this YouGov asked people to type in any slogans or messages they had heard the Conservative and Labour party say over the last couple of weeks. There was no prompting or answer options, just an empty text box. The tory line of "strong and stable" was spontaeneously recalled by 15% of people. The Tories other regular line about a "coalition of chaos" was recalled by 2% of people.
The Labour message that was most recalled was their campaign slogan of "For the many, not the few", but only by 2% (the second most recalled phrase was their criticism that the Tories were strong against the weak, and weak against the strong, but the total recall for that was below 1%).
So that robotic message discipline does, in its own terms, "work": people are recalling it, and therefore have a simple idea of the core Tory message at the election when they don't have the same for Labour. Equally, it's only 15% - just because those of us who closely follow politics are sick to the back teeth of hearing "strong and stable", there are still lots and lots of people who don't recall it at all.
Tabs are here.
(And while I'm here
- last week the regular YouGov tracker on whether people thought it was right or wrong to vote to leave the EU showed Wrong ahead. This was an unusual result and lots of people got all het up about it on social media. I did warn people that there wasn't a clear trend and not to get overexcited unless this week's poll showed the same...it doesn't. It shows 46% think it's right to leave, 43% wrong to leave)
