On Wednesday the SKWAWKBOX flagged that no post-conference polling was published after Labour’s conference in Brighton and predicted that polling would be published after the Tories’ Manchester event.
The absence of polling would allow the media to play up the routine ‘bounce’ that the Tories would receive after their conference while ignoring Labour’s similar or greater post-conference polling benefit.
As predicted, YouGov’s ‘voting intention’ polling was published after the Conservatives’ conference in Manchester and it showed exactly the 2% swing in favour of the Tories that this blog predicted – though the party was still behind Labour:
It’s worth noting that a significant part of the sampling was conducted before Theresa May’s ‘car crash’ conference-closing speech. It’s hard to imagine the speech having anything but an adverse impact on her and her party’s rating – and its disastrous nature will have thrown a big spanner in any media plans to make much of the polling.
Polling taken immediately after Labour’s conference would almost certainly have shown the party on 45% – possibly even higher, in light of the hugely positive event in Brighton – with the Tories down at 38% or lower.
As far as we can ascertain – YouGov have been asked for confirmation – this was the first time that no polling was published after a major party’s conference. Such polling would often be commissioned by a major media outlet.
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Strange that the polling was done “partly” after speech when I would’ve guess that in the past it would have all been done afterwards. I wonder what percentages were done before and after, did they publish that information and if not why not? My understanding is that YouGov have an online panel so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get all responses after a speech or a breakdown of before or after respondents.
We should await the Sunday papers. If they there are no polls in them after the conference season then that is another piece of evidence that the media are more about the Tories’ preservation than any analysis.
Not so strange when we know that Anthony Wells is Director of YouGov’s political and social opinion polling and currently runs their media polling operation for the Sun and Sunday Times.