Tuesday, January 01, 2008

The Only Poll That Matters (Sort Of)

The Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord (as indeed it is for those of a Christian persuasion) is always a time for reflection, so what better time to take a look at what is clearly the most important opinion poll in the modern world, Facebook’s UK Politics poll…


The headline results (as of 16:38 when I typed them) are;


  • Conservative – 33.2% (down 1.7% since October)
  • Labour – 29.8% (down 3.5%)
  • Liberal Democrats – 18.0% (down 0.6%)
  • Green (UK Total) – 4.6% (up 0.5%)
  • Others – 14.4% (up 5.3%)

There are now 7500 respondents, some 3000 more than in October, but the main trend in those 3000 appears to be a bias towards the smaller parties (possibly on account of being slower to get organised on Facebook). This is particularly noticeable in the category breakdown, where the relative results for the three main parties are essentially unchanged from October, but their absolute numbers are in all cases lower.


There’s plenty to feel good about from a Lib Dem perspective; we’ve held up best amongst the big three, and indeed in December we attracted 19.1% of new votes. There is, however, one strange pattern we could do with explaining, because if true it is rather unsettling. By age, the voting breaks down like this;


  • Under 25 – Tory 40.0%; Labour 27.8%; LD 15.4%
  • 25-29 – Tory 32.7%; Labour 32.5%; LD 18.5%
  • 30-34 – Labour 31.8%; Tory 26.3%; LD 20.4%
  • 35-44 – Labour 32.3%; Tory 28.5%; LD 22.2%

Given that LDYS' message has for many years been that we are the party of the youth vote, it might be nice for a poll on a youth-biased site to reflect that…


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