What the polls said about the debate

I personally agree with many of the specific points made by David Cameron in the Leaders' debate and will be quoting them on this blog.

However, I don't think it adds anything when political activists post that the person they have backed all along easily won the debate.

When I came home from my campaign meeting on Thursday, after the debate had finished, my first point of call was to see what the polls said about how people had done. There were four polls and - wait for it - each one gave a different result.

 
Obviously, four of the seven party leaders who took part can find at least one poll they will be pleased with. Being a statistician, my immediate reaction was to do a "poll of polls" which you can easily do for yourself by taking the sum or average of the four results.
 
I'm sure most of the people who read this blog will very quickly be able to work out what comes out of such an exercise, but for the benefits of any socialists reading this, or anyone else who can't add up, there was little difference between the first four but they came through in the following order:
 
Winner - David Cameron (A total of 88 out of 400 if you add the percentages, average score 22.0%)
Runner up - Ed Miliband  (86/400, average 21.5%)
Third place - Nigel Farage (84/400, average 21.0%)
Fourth place - Nicola Sturgeon (80/400, average 20%)
 
What that suggests to me is that all the leaders did well enough to retain the confidence of their core support and most of them managed to score at least some support among floating voters,
 
Anyone who says that the leader of the party they support was brilliant and all the others were useless would appear to be allowing their own views to colour their impression of the debate.
 
To get to 20% over all four polls in the UK as a whole when you lead a party which only exists in Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon is likely to have been the leader who most exceeded expectations, and was thought the winner by the largest number of people other than her own supporters.
 
However, David Cameron edges it over the four polls as a whole as the leader who the largest number of voters thought came over best.
 

Comments

Jim said…
Its kind of a "who won on question time" well, none of them and all of them.

thing is though I have a feeling that the only people who would have made a point of watching are those who are already decided, and they wanted to "watch [insert name here] win it" and of course in their opinion then that's exactly what [insert same name here] did, by a country mile.

In 2010 then Lib Dem got a boost from the debates but it did not last so long, a week or so later and it dropped back off, so more of a blip than a boost really. I would expect the same thing this time, that's if there are any changes at all.

I would agree with your previous comment that the only party realistically who can win outright are conservative, I cant see Labour doing it without Scotland, and I think SNP will storm Scotland, they should do too. they were gifted with the ideal election platform after the referendum (vote for us, so we can make sure Westminster do as they said) also if anyone could have gotten a boost i would say it would be Sturgeon, simply because she is a new leader so the recognition will have helped (everyone knows Alex Salmon, but now they know Nicola Sturgeon as well, even if they did not watch the debate a clip from the news will her out.

If the conservatives do win it i think it will be by a very narrow margin, they may need another coalition and Lib dem (ironically thanks to FPTP) may hold enough seats for that combination again.

SNP/Labour coalition is the real lurking danger. and I think it may come down to that, the conservative taking the most seats but not too many more than labour, so not enough for a majority. Thus it falls to SNP/Lib dem seats to form a coalition with someone.

playing the numbers game then we would end with LAB/SNP being able to outflank
Jim said…
wait and see now i have said all that, I will get around to actually watching the debate on catch up only to be proven 100% wrong
Chris Whiteside said…
We shall see: I agree that everything you have said there seems plausible.
Jim said…
I saw the debate this morning, figured i had better watch it as i have commented enough on it.

Anyway, turns out the things I said earlier (about the debate) were not too far wrong.

For the elecion bits, well I may still be proven wrong after 7th May, we shall see.

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