The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Some heroic spinning of the last opinion poll… June 16, 2010

…by Noel Whelan in the Irish Times at the weekend. And perhaps it’s best to allow the Fine Gael leader campaign/putsch/defenestration continue on its own way and consider other aspects of what surely must be a poll that has – for once – actually had some influence (mind you, for some reason I’m reminded of a certain IT poll prior to the Lisbon I referendum). So let’s look its reception elsewhere.

First up a statement of the obvious:

IF LAST January’s Ipsos/MRBI poll was a case of “move along now, nothing to see here”, yesterday’s poll is indeed equivalent to the scene of a political earthquake.
The poll contains three significant statistical shifts. The first is the dramatic fall back in Fianna Fáil support.
Having polled 42 per cent in the 2007 general election, Fianna Fáil’s vote fell dramatically in autumn 2008 to 25 per cent. By September 2008 it had fallen further to an historic low of 17 per cent.
Since then the party stabilised and nudged up gradually to 22 per cent last January. Now it has plummeted back again to the 17 per cent historic low.

And nothing good to read there:

Having taken the tough decisions, had the opportunity of a reshuffle and engaged more actively with media, Fianna Fáil and its leader are back where they were a year ago.
They just cannot get away from the medium-term legacy issue of responsibility for the economic crisis. The public didn’t have to wait for the Honohan or Watson-Regling reports to form a view on whom they held politically accountable for the economic, banking and employment crisis. In the minds of voters, Fianna Fáil takes all the blame and gets little credit for the corrective measures.

Amazing. Who would have thought it?

But it’s when he starts to parse the figures that his analysis really takes off for unknown conceptual territories:

In this week’s poll Fianna Fáil’s core vote stands at 16 per cent whereas the adjusted figure is 17 per cent. The Fianna Fáil vote measured on a straightforward allocation of the ‘Don’t Knows’ however is 21 per cent.
Labour’s core vote in this poll is an impressive 21 per cent but the adjusted figure is an extraordinary 32 per cent. On a straightforward allocation of the ‘Don’t Knows’ Labour would be at 29 per cent.

And…

None of this takes away from the significance of the Labour surge or the Fianna Fáil decline but it means the shifts, while spectacular, may not be as spectacular as they seem.

So, let’s get this straight. An adjusted poll figure (which, by the way I think is badly needed for the MRBI poll – and he’s not wrong there) would see Labour 3 percentage points below it’s ‘extraordinary’ 32 per cent. Dear oh dear. The wailing and gnashing of teeth from Labour at that. But perhaps that’s not his point and that what he means (which is what I suspect he’s trying to say) is that in reality they’re considerably less than 32%. He doesn’t quantify how much less, but say they’re six percentage points lower, or no, how about eight bringing them to 24%. Why not? That’s more or less where they were in the second last SBP poll.

Well, let’s cast our minds back, and remember that 1992 saw Labour on 19.5% of the vote and 33 seats. And let’s compare and contrast with the rather less stellar 10.8% they managed in 2007.

And 21 per cent for Fianna Fáil? Such thin stuff from which to set the political world to rights – eh?

So, perhaps his headline, Popularity shifts not quite the political earthquake they seem isn’t entirely apposite.

Stephen Collins trots out the Nick Clegg comparison. I wish he wouldn’t.

The Labour leader appears to have captured the mood for change in a similar way to Liberal leader Nick Clegg in the recent British election. At his party’s national conference in April, Gilmore cited the Clegg example as a reason why he should be involved in any leaders’ debate at the next election and he is clearly having an impact with the Irish electorate comparable to that of the Liberal leader with UK voters.

As mentioned previously, Clegg’s popularity took of – poll wise – in the aftermath of the first debate and during the election campaign. Where, it relatively rapidly ran out of steam. But, there’s another point. There’s little doubt that Gilmore’s steady as she goes persona is effective, but the political support in polls for the LP seems to me to go quite some way beyond that, because that represents a continued and prolonged support for the LP as a party. It may not be a very deep support, it may indeed be built on very little. But it exists nonetheless and therefore is, again, not strictly comparable to the UK situation.

Collins manfully attempts to raise a few caveats:

A striking feature of the approach by Gilmore and his party to the recession is a refusal to commit to what kind of hard decisions, if any, the party would take in Government. Labour’s decision to vote against the bank guarantee, its total opposition to Nama and its condemnation of all public spending cuts taken by the Government in response to the crisis has clearly gone down well with the public.

Gilmore’s refusal to be drawn on whether he believed the Croke Park deal was a good thing was symptomatic of an approach designed to avoid making enemies in any quarter and, while it has drawn criticism from his political opponents, the tactic has certainly paid off with the voters.

It seems that the public wants the Opposition to vent the anger so widely felt at the current plight of the country rather than telling them about the detailed and inevitably painful solutions required no matter who is in government. Giving effective expression to the widespread mood for change, while leaving the grubby detail of spending cuts until after the election, was what Clegg did in the British election and Gilmore is doing the same here.

Perhaps so. Again, I think the LP vote will fall back. But, I wonder if he’s correct that it’s just down to venting. The change issue is at least as strong, and the clear message is neither of the two ‘main’ parties please the electorate sufficiently, or not as sufficiently as they used to.

And that might trump the issue of just how precise Gilmore has to be on ‘pain’. Indeed it could be that the government and the media have been a little too successful in putting that notion around, and now the electorate are only too happy to inflict pain back on them.

And perhaps with that in mind Collins is uncharacteristically downbeat about the future situation of the government…

As for Fianna Fáil, it is clear that the party’s role in presiding over the disastrous policies of the past decade has done it dreadful damage in the eyes of the public. The party is headed for Opposition after the next election and the only question is the scale of its defeat.

Seems about right.