Week 1 of the 2015 Campaign

Over the last week, we saw the public react to Channel 4's Jeremy Paxman interviewing Ed Miliband and David Cameron.  Despite the initial excitement when the first two polls came out, we have seen a bit of an overall shift over the last seven days.

Average of polls released as of Saturday evening

As of Saturday evening, there have not been enough polls released following this week's ITV Leaders' Debate to say definitively whether it has resulted in any shift in sentiment.  All we've had is the Survation poll released yesterday, and that poll is also the first since the Sky/C4 event, meaning it can't tell us what effect the ITV debate had.

What we have, though, is reaction from that Sky/C4 programme from over a week ago.  On Monday, I commented about the initial polls from YouGov and ComRes, both of which appear to have been blips towards Labour and the Conservatives, respectively.  Once those blips were averaged out, the initial result had been no significant change.

As we came to the end of March, though, we saw a swing from Labour to the Conservatives of 15 seats.  We saw different trends in different parts of the country: in England and Wales, we saw 17 seats swing from Labour to the Conservatives, while in Scotland, we see a 7-seat swing from the SNP back to Labour.

Overall, we see a Labour lead of four seats, which is down from 30 this time last week.  In terms of the individual polls, we have seen five polls with the Conservatives leading, four with Labour leading, and three that are tied.  This represents the first period since January 2012 where the Conservatives have led a plurality of the polls in terms of the popular vote.

Now, I need to make a note about those two blip polls I mentioned earlier.  The YouGov poll, which showed the four-point Labour lead, is not included in the model as subsequent polls from YouGov have bumped it out.  However, no ComRes poll has been released since the one showing the four-point Conservative lead.  The overall effect of this poll on the model is about half of a percentage point, or about five seats.  This means that, assuming the next ComRes poll come back into line with the consensus, I would expect that Labour lead to grow to around 10 seats.

Average of opinion polls since prorogation of Parliament

To Watch This Week

When you average the "who won the debate" snap polls, it was a statistical four-way tie between Labour, the Conservatives, UKIP and the SNP.  UKIP's Nigel Farage was the bookies' favourite to win the debate comfortably; since he didn't meet expectations, the chances of his party holding the balance of power have reduced to practically nil.  On the other hand, the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon was considered an outsider going into the debate, and it's leading voters north of the border (who haven't already) to give her party a second look.  Her strong performance has even led to a number of English voters asking Google whether they can vote for the SNP (the answer, by the way, is no).  It will be interesting to see what impact this will have on the polls in England, owing to the prospect of that party potentially holding the balance of power.