Political anoraks love opinion polls. They walk along the street daydreaming of pie charts and they stay awake at night thinking of multicoloured bar charts.
They love pouring over the detailed tables that you find at the back of a polling company’s report; rows and columns of raw data that reveal how farmers vote compared to blue collar workers, or how women and men view the world in starkly different ways most of the time — if proof were ever needed.
The Irish probably love their polls more than most. At the football match, in the supermarket aisle, down the pub; politics, political intrigue and the latest poll results are the stuff of great conversation. But then, they can be dramatically wrong. Just ask Ed Miliband.
The former British Labour leader appeared tantalisingly close to ousting David Cameron from Downing Street earlier this year. Labour and the Conservatives were judged to have been neck and neck throughout the campaign and were tied at 34 per cent each with YouGov on the eve of voting. However, in the end, Labour got 30.4 per cent of the vote and the Tories got 36.9 per cent. Mr Cameron managed to harvest 331 seats to Mr Miliband’s 232 on the back of that six and a half point gap. He didn’t need the LibDems, the DUP or anyone else to form a government.
In Canada, the opinion polls tracked a long and very dramatic general election campaign that concluded on Monday with a radical reversal of the political pecking order.The contest showed that party dominance in opinion polls — even long-established trends — can be dramatically overturned in the course of an election campaign. Just ask Tom Mulcair.
Advertisement
Who, you ask?
Well, Mr Mulcair is the leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP). At the outset of Canada’s marathon election campaign — it lasts 78 days under new fixed-term rules — the party was doing extremely well in the polls. He told supporters at every stop on the hustings that the NDP was closer to power then than at any point in its 54-year history. He was right in August when it had an 11-point lead in one poll and a 6-point lead in another. He was right until mid-September when the lead was cut to 0.3 per cent. The party slowly drifted off the pace, and Justin Trudeau, the 43-year-old leader of the Liberals, began to loom large.
In the end, Mr Mulcair limped home in third place after the race became a contest between Stephen Harper, Canada’s Conservative prime minister since 2006, and Mr Trudeau, who said his party won because he persisted with a positive campaign built on positive messaging.
As Eoin O’Malley, the Dublin City University (DCU) social scientist, said on Twitter yesterday, Canada’s shock result “should warn us from reading too much into polls months out from an election. Campaigns matter”.
The message from the opinion polls in Ireland right now is so confusing, a campaign would bring some much needed clarity. Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have the numbers to form a majority government — just about — on 24 per cent and 19 per cent respectively. However, they have both vowed not to coalesce.
Advertisement
Sinn Fein also stands on 19 per cent and so could also reach 43 per cent if combined with Fine Gael, but the latter has said it will not do business with Sinn Fein and the former has said it will not do business at all until it is the largest party in any prospective government.
Faced with the report published yesterday by Theresa Villiers, the Northern Ireland secretary, which states categorically that IRA structures still exist and that members still possess some weapons, Sinn Fein is unlikely to experience a surge in the polls, at least in the short term.
Tom Louwerse, a political scientist in Trinity College Dublin, has published his own compendium of Irish opinion poll results and the findings are surprising. Labour, for example, has trended more up than down in 2015 and is better placed now than at the start of the year, although the party is still averaging around 8 per cent.
Fine Gael is better off now too, averaging 28.5 per cent. In January it averaged 22 per cent. At 19.6 per cent, Fianna Fail is a point ahead of the start of the year but Sinn Fein, alone among the larger parties, is on a downward slope.
From 22.4 per cent in January and 23.1 per cent in February, Gerry Adams’s party has slumped to an October running average of just 18.9 per cent. That trend will be difficult to reverse as long as the party is talking about the “they still haven’t gone away, you know” report, even if its findings will hardly come as a shock to Sinn Fein’s core support.
Advertisement
There is another dynamic afoot among the minor placings. Some 17 per cent will vote for one of the smaller parties and 7 per cent of those voters will support either People Before Profit, the Anti-Austerity Alliance or the Socialist Party, a subset of AAA. These groups have formed a joint election platform and 7 per cent support — growing to 12 per cent in Dublin — is a fairly solid base.
Only the Independent Alliance — Shane Ross, Finian McGrath et al — on 5 per cent come anywhere near this kind of bloc vote . Renua trails behind on 2 per cent. As do the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Workers’ Party on 1 per cent.
The figures tell us an exciting campaign awaits with new brands, a potential for change, and the possibility of genuine political upset.
All we need now is the election. And some new colours for the pie chart.