I read on Sky News yesterday that there is a slight difference of opinion on ‘which party’ is currently out in front? There were three poll results published: ComRes, YouGov and Populus who conducted telephone interviews over two days between the 18th & 20th of April
- ComRes – interviewed 1012 adults on April 18th & 19th puts the Conservatives 9 points in front on 35% with Labour and the Lib Dems both on 26%
- YouGov – interviewed 1595 adults on April 19th & 20th and puts the Lib Dems back in the lead on 34%. With the Conservatices on 31% and Labour on 26%
- Populus – interviewed 1501 adults on April 19th & 20th and puts the Liberal Democrats a 10 point increase from last week (31%), just 1 point behind the Conservatives (32%) down 4 points, and 3 points in front of Labour (28%) down 5 points
Confused? Yes… me too. So I thought I’d add some additional keywords into my General Election dashboard on Radian6 around the subjects of:
- Will vote
- Won’t vote
- Not sure
I set the date parameters from the 18th up until today and there’s a total of 35,336 posts with 7,124 posts mentioning keywords from within the 3 areas above. Not a bad sample I thought – at least 4 times as many as the official polls…And here’s what I found:
- 46.8% will vote (3336 posts)
- 45.9% won’t vote (3271 posts)
- 7.3% not sure (517 posts)
The next question begged to be answered: What percentage % of the ‘Will Vote’ would be Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem… and this is what I found:
- Lib Dem 42.2% (1484 posts)
- Labour 31.2% (1098 posts)
- Conservative 26.5% (932 posts)
And this is the total online conversation split between Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems
And this is the sentiment split over the last 5 days:
Click to enlarge
…And finally
For me, the parties need to engage with the people that are openly stating that they ‘won’t vote’ and address why directly with them – rather than push the traditional ‘Vote <insert party name here> with no substance or perceived value behind the conversation and expect people to say ‘ok, I’ll do that then…!’
It’s quite obvious that so many people cannot separate the parties, which potentially makes people think:
a) ‘What’s the point’
b) ‘My vote won’t make a difference’
c) ‘I don’t understand how to tell which party is right for me’
d) ‘They’re all as bad as one another’
All the political parties need to start addressing these ‘common’ thoughts, and engage with honesty and transparency. And the first one to do so, implementing the new ROI (return on involvement) will have an edge going into the General Election on May 6th…
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