A lot of words have been written about this week’s YouGov poll for the Evening Standard which has Boris on 49% of first preferences, Livingstone on 37%, Paddick on 13%, most of them predicting the end of Ken.
As you’d imagine many Tory supporters have been lauding the result as great news and much of the mainstream media have repeated the findings without question.
At the risk of upsetting everyone, the poll is wrong.
Looking back at the 2004 results it’s clear that it undercounts the appeal of smaller parties giving them just 3% of first preference votes when last time around they scored more than 18%.
Even allowing for the possibility that Respect’s showing of 3.21% was abnormally high because of anti-war sentiment it’s hard to see how support for UKIP (6.02%), BNP (3.04%) and Green (2.99%) could have collapsed so dramatically.
I don’t pretend to know what the final results will look like on May 1st but I’ll confidently predict they won’t look much like any of the polls conducted in the next few weeks.
Damian Hockney AM says
Congratulations once again on clearly and exclusively highlighting a very important point…no doubt the pollsters will give their usual bland response, but there is an important point here. As a potential Mayoral candidate, I was told by an evening newspaper which is very important to the Mayoral race that I could not have my policy initiatives covered by the newspaper because polling so far had made them decide to exclude us from the ranks of “main” candidates. With polling underplaying the smaller parties (again) and there being so little commitment to coverage of issues rather than personalities and the major parties, is it any wonder that turnout will (again) be disastrously low?
VotingUKIP says
Martin, you’re probably right but you’re going to be a lone voice on this one, the media are desperate to make their predictions of Ken’s demise come true and will latch on to anything which supports their three party view of the world.
James says
The poll makes no sense.
A few weeks ago everyone was getting anxious over the prospect of the BNP winning a seat which would mean then getting more than 5 percent.
Now pollsters are telling us they, the Greens and UKIP are sharing 3pts between them.
lynn Kearn says
the polls are indeed wrong, you have to look at the party supporters and which ones are going soft, the lib dems are collapsing, and Ken is also suffering badly but i don’t believe these votes are going to Boris,
the voters will simply not turn up. its easy to `say` you will vote for a lesser of the two evils but it’s not so inspiring to actually do it.
you also have to keep in mind that the BNP always poll low but produce significantly higher actual results, this is because the BNP are demonised in the press so that no one wants to openly admit they actually plan to vote BNP in case the thought police kick down their door, many of these people will say they support boris or undecided.
in the last election the BNP polled around 1% in national polls when it came to London. They actually got nearly 5%!
in the latest national poll with a London componant the BNP polled 5%.
if you tally this up you get a result for the BNP of around 25% which is close to what they achieve in local elections on a regular basis.
do i think the BNP will get 25%? no because in this case personality plays a bigger part Ken vs Boris etc but dont be shocked if the BNP out vote the Lib Dems, and get around 15%.
achieving such a result would be remarkable in light of a hostile mainstreme bias press.
good luck to them is what i say, Richard Barnbrook is a very credible leader.