Expect No Further Labour Gains: What You See is What You Get

UK election polls have stabilized. The Tory lead is somewhere between 7% and 15%.

Whatever inroads Labour was going to make are now very likely fully realized.

My table is from Opinion Polling for the 2019 United Kingdom General Election.

The table is missing a line. I added the latest Savanta ComRes Poll based on this Tweet.

Savanta ComRes

New @SavantaComRes poll for @Telegraph just out, with new prompting to replicate actual constituency ballot papers:
Con 42 (-1)
Lab 32 (-1)
LD 12 (-1)
BXP 3 (-1)
SNP 4 (+1)
Grn 2 (-1)
Other 6 (+5)

— Andrew Hawkins (@AHSavantaComRes) December 4, 2019

Polls vs Prior Polls by Same Pollster

 

Poll vs Prior Poll Synopsis

• Support for Tories has not budged one iota.
• Labour picked up a point at the expense of the Liberal Democrats

UK Poll Lead Changes by Pollster

 

Let's assume you believe Opinium has the direction correct and Labour gained a whopping 4 percentage points.

OK, but please note Opinium's starting point. Opinium has the Tory lead at 15 percentage points down from 19 percentage points.

Woah Nelly!

If you are a Labour back you might object that a 15 point Tory lead cannot possibly be correct.

While "possible", I am inclined to agree that the overall idea is highly unlikely. In fact, I think it is so unlikely that it is wise to exclude Opinium from the analysis. So, let's do that.

UK Election Poll vs Prior Poll by the Same Pollster Excluding Opinium

 

Poll vs Prior Poll Excluding Opinium Synopsis

• Support for Tories rose slightly vs no change
• Support for Labour rose 0.6 PP vs 1.0 PP prior
• The average Tory lead fell from 9.83 to 8.80 but the change in Tory lead also rose by 0.60 PP from -1.0 to -0.40.

Poll to Poll Stability

Tossing away Opinium as a flawed poll, the leads look like this: 10, 9, 7, 9, 9.

And by throwing away Opinium, the poll-to-poll change in leads looks like this: 0, 0, 0, 0, -2. The -2 swing in favor of Labour is to a plus 9 PP advantage for the Tories.

Which one of those results do you care to believe?

Labour's Only Hope

The only hope for Labour is that every poll is seriously wrong and all of them in the same direction.

Seat by Seat

I will crunch the latest Savanta ComRes numbers on a seat-by-seat basis tomorrow. Given the overall lead has not changed, I expect the overall projections to be similar but with some number of seat-by seat changes.