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blackbeardblog:

I made this chart by grabbing all the opinion poll data UK Polling Report has gathered since the May General Election and then averaging it by month. Nate Silver I ain’t, but if you want to know what’s happening in British politics (as reflected in the opinion polls), this is it. Almost none of the polls feeding into this aggregate have made headline news. Several haven’t been reported at all, even by the papers that paid for them.

There are two reasons these polls haven’t been widely reported. The first is that, after the election fiasco, nobody trusts them. (Most of the polls here are using new models the polling companies have developed since the election, though.)

The second is that nothing much is happening. And this is inconvenient. There are three big narratives in British politics at the moment. The first is the idea that Labour have made themselves unelectable for a generation by making Jeremy Corbyn leader. The second, related to the first, is that the Tories have seized the centre ground of politics with George Osbourne’s “living wage” and David Cameron’s more inclusive conference language. The third, very much opposed to the first, is that Jeremy Corbyn’s new politics is going to win a lot of lost voters back to Labour.

There is, so far, no evidence in the polls for any of these. Corbyn’s election has not caused Labour to bleed support. Nor has it won them any. The Conservatives have not expanded their support or become a one nation party. The electorate, at the moment, don’t much care what’s happening, or not enough to say they’ll change their votes. On the seismograph of polling, the earthquake in UK politics simply wasn’t. So it’s no surprise that the media, wary of pollsters after May, have chosen to ignore them.

From my work blog. I am perversely fascinated by how little the polling dog has barked since Corbyn’s election, and amused by how determined the media is to ignore that. Polls have, of course, occasionally been reported. The Evening Standard headlined the latest with “Dump Corbyn before next election, say 42% of voters”. They didn’t mention that 39% of voters also said “Dump Cameron before next election”.