I was babbling about polls earlier, so here is some more. Ipsos MORI did a quick-reaction flash poll after the Chancellor’s statement. This is worth having, as they can apparently get 1,071 adults weighted to the profile of the population to do an online poll between Gideon sitting down and close of business. The eye-catcher is this question.
This is rather what I was going on about in my post on the windshear between opinions about the “UK economy” as an abstraction and about one’s personal affairs. But there’s more here:
They provide a crossbreak of the question covering just those people who stated that they were informed about the statement in some way, for example, having watched it on the news.
The more they knew, the less they liked. I think you could make a case that working the windshear and adding energy to the argument is sense. Also, this contemporaneous YouGov poll is crushing if you’re a Tory. If this keeps up, I wouldn’t mind betting that the polls repeat the odd seasonality of the last two years again this year.
Seasonality? Yeah. If you dump the lot and plot a moving average (I used 8 periods, to operationalise a couple of polls a week) you get something like this. Over the winters of 2011 and 2012, they lost about 10 points peak to trough, and recovered a bit in late summer/early autumn, netting out about a 5 point loss for each cycle. Since early autumn, the average has turned down again.
Perhaps it’s the energy bills, or just the fact that official politics is turned off for most of the summer. Remind me, when in the year do we usually have a general election?