Thursday, April 16, 2015

Super Sturgeon claims 31% backing in BRITAIN-WIDE post-debate poll from Survation

[UPDATE, 11pm : The Survation datasets are now out, and show that viewers in Scotland think Nicola Sturgeon won the debate by a massive margin of 68% to 17%.  More details can be found HERE.]

Here are the Britain-wide numbers...

Who do you think 'won' the debate? (Survation, respondents across Britain) :

Ed Miliband 34.7%
Nicola Sturgeon 31.1%
Nigel Farage 27.1%
Natalie Bennett 4.7%
Leanne Wood 2.4%

Even though a close second for a 'wicked separatist' is absolutely astonishing in any Britain-wide poll, my strong suspicion is that it was even better than that.  Survation was the least favourable for Sturgeon of the four firms that conducted instant polls after the first debate, and it seems likely that YouGov in particular would have had her well ahead tonight.

UPDATE : Even Survation have Nicola Sturgeon clearly ahead among Britain-wide respondents when the question is asked in a slightly different way...

Putting aside your own party preference and basing your answer on what you saw or heard during the programme, which one of the 5 leaders do you think performed the 'best'? (Survation, respondents across Britain) :

Nicola Sturgeon 35.2%
Ed Miliband 29.3%
Nigel Farage 25.5%
Natalie Bennett 5.3%
Leanne Wood 4.7%

It's probably the 'putting aside your party preference' bit that makes the difference here - obviously there are far more Labour than SNP voters across the whole UK, so if respondents aren't asked to set that aside, it leaves Miliband with an in-built advantage.

After the first debate, YouGov used "leaving aside your own political preference" in the wording to their headline question, which probably goes a long way to explaining why they reported Sturgeon as the clear winner when other firms didn't.  Another factor was that they included more undecided voters in their sample.

4 comments:

  1. Tables

    http://survation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Post-Debate-Poll-Tables.pdf

    Sturgeon won 68% in Scotland (n=92). Miliband 17%

    Sturgeon won 27% in England and 31% in Wales.

    She also won the poll if you consider the difference between "best" and "worst", rather than the headline figure.

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  2. I think the survation numbers tell you what the maximum potential Labour vote is. (i.e. 35%). Tonight Milliband had the floor to try and grow his vote and he picks up at best very similar numbers to every other poll.

    I'm amazed that Farage got 27% of the vote but given he was the only right winger on display you have to imagine a fair number of Tories went for him.

    Sturgeon just breezed through that debate, she is on a different level to all the other leaders in the UK at the moment and I would imagine she picked up a fair number of libdems and disenfranchised Labour supporters across the UK tonight

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  3. Brilliant performance - and Ed Miliband couldn't bring himself to accept that his party needs the cooperation of the SNP and Plaid Cymru to lock the Tories out of Number Ten.

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  4. Labour are heavily overweighted in this:

    % of people asked by voting intention:
    Lab - 32.7%
    Con - 25.2%
    Ukip - 18.8%
    Other - 9.9%
    Undecided - 8.1%
    Lib - 5.2%

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