Political betting has pointed out an interesting little detail in the ICM poll this week that put Cameron below Ming Campbell in the political beauty contest,
The above is part of the detailed data from yesterday’s ICM poll in the Guardian and has figures which should be deeply worrying for the Tory leadership.
The section I reproduce shows the current voting intentions of those who said they voted for the three main parties in 2005 and the figure that stands out is the proportion of 2005 Tory voters who now say they will switch to UKIP. From a quick scan through the records this is the highest this has been.
Until now there’ve been lots of threats on CONhome and from writers like Simon Heffer of a desertion of traditional Tory voters to UKIP and this simply has not been shown in the polling data - that is until this latest survey.
Normally the number of Tory>UKIP switchers has been at 1% or even less. This figure is quite startling.
3 comments:
You are obviously easily startled today. Has it been that bad a week?
The margin of error of a poll with a sample of 140 is about 9%
The numbers in breakdowns like this are interesting - particularly if they are repeated over a period of time - but statistically they are meaningless in themselves
Mike I was not the startled one, that was Mike Smithson, not one to starle easy in the normal run of things.
I agree that this could well be a freak result, as some of the commentators point out in the comments. But interesting nontheless
The next ICM poll (a week later)seems to have the figure down to under 1%.
This would mean that fewer people who voted Conservative in 2005 are planning to switch to UKIP than people who voted Labour or Lib Dem at the last election
Post a Comment