A fascinating post has just gone live on YouGov's UK Polling Report blog. YouGov - through their recently launched BrandIndex product - are polling every day on consumer perceptions of leading brands from Barclays Bank to Boots the Chemist to Coca Cola. BrandIndex purports to be able to tell companies whether their brand is rising or falling in public esteem on a daily basis. It gives corporate HQs a fast way of assessing consumer reactions to major market events, product launches or advertising campaigns, for example.
But more interestingly - as far as we political activists are concerned - the Brand Index surveys are also asking - again on a daily basis - about the ratings of individual politicians, party image and which politicians are most trusted with certain key issues. UK Polling Report presents the three top findings from the recent data:
1. Triple Whammy Wednesday didn't just hit Labour hard, Labour hasn't recovered: "In April around 25% of people associated Labour with being competent, the figure has now settled at around 17%". Conservatives must hope that Labour has gained a deserved reputation for incompetence - in the same way that the 1990s Tories gained a reputation for sleaze and selfishness - and that it will be difficult for Tony Blair or any successor to overcome.
2. David Cameron's approval ratings are on the rise. The Tory leader's ratings were declining just before Triple Whammy Wednesday - suggesting that the glacier trip and other soft messages weren't particularly effective. Cameron's ratings then rose again as he looked like a winner on May 4th. They've kept rising since.
3. Ming Campbell has an approval rating of -23%. The LibDem leader's rating slid after sustained media criticism of his PMQs and other performances and haven't recovered since the recent policy relaunches on crime and tax. The only source of consolation for Britain's third party, says UK Polling Report, is that "the proportion of people who don’t know what they think about [Ming's] leadership - while declining - is still in the mid-40s, so there are plenty of people who haven’t mind their minds up yet."
Go to UK Polling Report for full graphs and more information on other top political figures and issues. I wonder if we are on the brink of a new era in opinion polling. YouGov are collecting this data on a daily basis and it would be perfectly possible for them to start publishing on a daily basis. I don't think we are far away from daily political polling and a revolution in the opinion survey industry.
I also note from UKPR that MORI had a new survey in yesterday's Observer (which I missed). It put Tories on 41% (unchanged from the Sun/MORI poll) and Labour on 34% (+3) and the LibDems on just 18%. I'll update ConservativeHome's poll of polls in the morning.
Don't want to put a dampener on your euphoria, but this would drive people up the wall. The minuscule changes from day to day would become an irrelevance to the masses, and hyper-anorak time for the politicos. Changes can and do manifest themselves monthly, even weekly, but daily? Who cares if Prescott's approval is 14% on Monday, 14.3% on Tuesday, and 15% on Wednesday? Daily polling will take the 'news' out of significant changes. Everything will be incremental.
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn.
Posted by: Nadim | June 19, 2006 at 22:44
Understandable reaction, Nadim, and I would agree if that were point. But it's not daily incremental change that we want to highlight - rather two quite different things:
1) Immediate measurement of change when there IS significant change
2) Seeing the overall pattern - occasional snapshots can't do that so well.
For example, when did Cameron's ratings really change? The daily picture shows it was the halo effect of being seen as a winner after the local election results, not the local election campaign itself.
And we've had a lot of specualtion lately about whether Cameron is waning - but our figures show that the upward shift is, for the moment at least, sustaining itself quite firmly.
We see Patricia Hewitt recovering from her sudden drop, but Charles Clarke staying down up until his dismissal.
Posted by: Stephan | June 19, 2006 at 22:52
God help us! Endlessly watching a shopping channel fronted by a big brother contestant painting a wall would be more preferable!
Posted by: Anon | June 19, 2006 at 23:36
The June ICM Poll for the Guardian is out as well:
Con 37 (-1)
Lab 32 (-2)
LD 21 (+1)
Posted by: A H Matlock | June 20, 2006 at 00:06
The availability of this information can only be helpful, surely? Yes, most people won't be interested (most people aren't interested in Bloomberg either) but those of us who are will find it fascinating and, in a political context, very useful.
Posted by: Donal Blaney | June 20, 2006 at 07:52
Couldn't agree more with Donal. It really won't be the stuff of daily political news but more a tool for those actively engaged in politics to track the relationship between events and reactions.
Posted by: Henry Edward-Bancroft | June 20, 2006 at 08:10
The danger of daily polling would be that party news managers would be tempted to believe they could accurately judge the effect or popularity of a policy by looking at the immediate reaction to it in the polls. People’s perceptions of parties changes more slowly than that. Labours deserved reputation for spendthrift incompetence has taken years to build, which is lucky for us, as with such foundations, it is going to be near impossible to reverse.
Political anoraks (in which I include myself) may well like daily polling, but let’s be well aware of the limitations of what it might be telling us.
Posted by: South Londoner | June 20, 2006 at 12:43
Perhaps if they just limited the daily polls to particular websites those of us sad enough to be interested could stare at them until our heart's content.
Posted by: Richard | June 20, 2006 at 22:51