This is my first opinion poll tracker post since the General Election on 8th June 2017. Nearly 5 months have passed and only now can we say that politics is starting to move on from the election. I thought it was worth updating this post to see what current voting intentions are but this will not be an in depth post compared to earlier posts.
Since the election, Labour has been leading the Conservatives in the polls by 2% or so. This is mostly due to defections by some Conservative voters other than that, voter movements have been minor.
National Overview
Chart G1 shows the Conservatives have slipped back since the 2017 election and Labour now has a 2% lead in Great Britain. The most striking thing about G1 is the quite extraordinary recovery in the Labour vote from mid-April 2017 when the election was killed. Understanding why this happened is key to making sense of the 2017 election and what is likely to happen next. I have to say that from what I have read from political commentators, no-one has yet made sense of this dramatic surge. For myself, I keep coming back to a comment I made to my wife (who is American) that the election was starting to remind me of the Democrats primary battle in 2016 between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and I do feel that the two elections share a similar dynamic.
Despite dropping back, the Conservatives are still well placed when compared to previous elections. The difference is that we are now back to 2-party politics last seen in 1979 as shown by chart G3. It would appear from chart G2 that most of the movement away from the Conservatives has been towards UKIP. This does make sense in that UKIP did not stand in many seats in the 2017 election and as a result their vote share would have been artificially depressed. The Greens did a similar thing to UKIP but they have not seen a rebound in their vote which suggests that Green defectors in the electors are remaining loyal to Labour.
Brexit Vote Dynamics
I will update this section in a later post.
Voter Switching Patterns
I will update this section in a later post.
Regional Trends
Following the 2017 general election, I analysed why my forecast was in error by such a large margin. I was able to show that the key error was that the opinion polls were not uniform in their underestimate of the Labour vote. In the South and Scotland, the polls were broadly in line with the final results and my forecast was not that far out. However, in the North & Midlands the error was considerable which had a dramatic effect on my forecast.
Given this error, it will be a while before I decide to update this section.
Voter Demographics
The 2017 General Election saw the elimination of class as a predictor of voting intentions but age become a more distinct differentiator between the parties. I will keep an eye on demographics in the polls and at some point I will update this section.
