Adam Drummond
@AGKD123
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Head of political / social research @OpiniumResearch, basically asking random people for their opinions and putting it into PPT
London
Joined May 2011
I was hanging around here before it was cool (also a bit after it was initially cool, basically in that uncool gap):.
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Just weird to hear Cameron say "wokery" considering his USP back in the day was meant to be "I'm a Tory who isn't horrified by social change" and one of the achievements he listed when he resigned was same sex marriage.
"Vote for the [Liberal] Democrats, they won't hold Labour to account. They're not a force to confront them.". Lord Cameron says the Lib Dems would make Labour "worse", with "more wokery, more nonsense". Politics latest: 📺 Sky 501 / YouTube
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This is my dad's favourite road sign. In 1980 (apparently), some pub regulars sent a "if you don't reply we'll assume it's fine" letter to then-mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac. In 2001 Whitwell had a population of 41. Today it could be as high as 50, maybe 55
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Nobody's here for the new material, just play "chaos with Ed Miliband" and get the crowd going.
If we don’t have a plan, we create a more dangerous and uncertain world. No one knows what Keir Starmer stands for. Our enemies will seek to take advantage of the uncertain world he creates.
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Yea but it's not as if Ed Miliband was trying to eat that sandwich through his ear or something, you don't get points for being technically correct.
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Today's stat: Liz Truss has a 26% approval rating *among Conservative party members who voted for Liz Truss*.
NEW: @JLPartnersPolls of Conservative Party members for @Telegraph. If there were a repeat contest today, members would vote for Rishi Sunak over Liz Truss - by a margin of 60% to 40%. More than half of Tory members think the PM is doing a bad job. (1/5).
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It's so awkward when you have a client who's already written the story for your poll and then you have to send over the results which just. don't back it up at all.
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I agree but that lesson is "just count the votes on Thursday night like everywhere else does".
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Another in the genre where "told" should be followed with "by some nutjob".
Keir Starmer told to end 'war on countryside' over Boxing Day Hunts to win election
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Patrick and the team have again been forced to conduct days of advanced MRP analysis on "a Labour government led by Keir Starmer vs. a Conservative government led by the ghost of Winston Churchill who has also promised to abolish ULEZ".
Get excited, people - something's coming from us here at @YouGov ! 👀🚨.
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The key number with ULEZ isn't 500 votes in Uxbridge but "9 in 10", that's the proportion of cars in outer London TfL reckons already meet the ULEZ requirements. If thats true then the by-election was perfectly timed to capitalise on fears of it rather than its actual impact.
Labour look like they are wildly overreacting over ULEZ.
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UNS would put this at roughly:.Lab 560.Con 1.LD 13.SNP 52. So I suppose John Hayes, MP for South Holland and the Deepings becomes Tory leader by default?.
NEW: Westminster Voting Intention poll (12 Oct):. 🔴 LAB: 53% (+1 from 6 Oct).🔵 CON: 19% (-1).🟠 LDM: 8% (=).🟢 GRN: 6% (-1).🟡 SNP: 6% (+1). Full tables:
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I have never seen so many people fail to read the word "lead".
New: The BBC's projected national share analysis puts Labour on 36%, some nine points over the Conservatives. That's the biggest lead since 2010. John Curtice says it could mean a 4.5% swing at Westminster, "perhaps just enough" to win the general election #LocalElections2023.
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"Men being overconfident": an Easter themed thread. Men are far more confident than women that they could eat an Easter-egg-sized Creme Egg in the space of 2 hours
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With decimals Leave edges it but we haven't reported on decimals because anybody who works with survey data and confidence intervals will tell you that's insane.
Hypothetical EU referendum voting intention:. Leave w/ Boris Johnson's Brexit plan: 42%.Remain: 42%. via @OpiniumResearch, 15 - 17 Oct.
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Hard to know if this is more or less embarrassing than when he got the Treasury to make an NFT.
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Good thing they got voted out I guess.
Glorious sunny day in soho and yet for some unfathomable reason Westminster Council ended al fresco dining so even on days like today businesses can’t take advantage of the weather & streets are less full of life. Opportunity squandered.
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In the same poll, Sarwar's net approval is +9 (31% vs. 22%) and he's the most popular leader apart from Sturgeon.
Anas Sarwar was Keir Starmer's choice for Scottish Labour leader, and his team believed he would turn the party's fortunes around. Let's see how that's going.
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Ultimately the problem for Labour is that even in 2017 when everything broke their way (good campaign, poor Tory campaign, weak hubristic opponent, winning liberal middle classes but holding just enough trad working class) they were still 55 seats behind.
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My favourites are the "Opinium always show good news for Labour because it's the Observer" takes. Guys at one point in the 2019 campaign we had the Tories NINETEEN points ahead! Maybe your knowledge of this industry is less than airtight?.
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Stat of the week is the massive gap between how many estates pay inheritance tax and how many people think they'd benefit from it being abolished.
Despite government figures showing that only 4% of estates incur inheritance tax, a third (34%) of UK adults believe they and their family would benefit from the abolition of inheritance tax, including two in five (39%) 2019 Conservative voters.
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Tempted to say this is the dumbest, most pathetic and nationally embarrassing controversy of the year but then I remembered the trade yacht
EXC 'Silence of the Bongs' row grows over switching off of Big Ben's historic 'democracy lamp' above Parliament
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Remember folks, polls can be bad but pundits are worse.
In the Spectator, Bruce Anderson claims the undecideds could still swing it for the Tories . "I could not detect any sign of a Labour landslide; there is no surge of enthusiasm for Mr Blair or his party. A majority of the voters would prefer to see Mr Major as prime minister"
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Shoutout to the poll respondent who answered "a free owl" when asked if anything could convince them to vote Labour in future.
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Opinium never said a thing about Sam Gyimah or Kensington.
On one hand Opinium have been the outlier in recent polling, and said Sam Gyimah was the best candidate to beat the Tories in Kensington in 2019. On the other hand the Lib Dems have chosen a man as leader who has less charisma than a charity shop mannequin.
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Fun fact (I think it's a fact, not 100%). The US party colours are a relatively recent thing. Until 2000 the TV networks would alternate the colours each election and it's only Republican=red, Democrat=blue because that's how it was in 2000 and the map was on TV for weeks on end.
There are many things that annoy me about US politics, but the biggest one is how the left-leaning party is coloured blue and the right-wing party is coloured red. This will never make sense to me.
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In the meantime, Starmer and Sunak have basically traded the lead on the "best PM" question for months, one week Starmer's ahead by 2, the other week Sunak's ahead. But on approval ratings, Starmer is consistently scoring better net ratings and mostly better raw approval ratings.
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James has just seen the results of this week's @OpiniumResearch / Observer poll. If you too want a piece of this action keep your eyes peeled for tomorrow night.
Wow.
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I realise politics moves fast but not enough people are connecting the Green figure with the fact that COP26 is happening.
NEW @IpsosMORI / Evening Standard. Labour lead by one. LAB: 36% (-).CON: 35% (-4).GRN: 11% (+5).LDEM: 9% (-). Fieldwork dates: 29 Oct to Nov 4 (before Commons vote on Paterson / Standards last week).
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This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
🔵 Oust Sunak or Tories face election massacre, warns former Cabinet ally. A YouGov poll suggests that a new Tory leader could secure a convincing victory over Labour. Read more ⬇️.
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You do realise both can be true right?.
Twitter full of Remainer attacks on Boris and Britain over Russian links but it’s their beloved Merkel who presided over Germany becoming massively dependent on Russian energy. That dependence is the number one weakness in the West’s response to the invasion of Ukraine.
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But I thought that Ashcroft poll showed Johnson had a huge personal vote that defied the national swing against the Tories?.
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We're apparently heading for a 5 quarter recession so if the "Left Blob" is still Truss's biggest foe then almost well done to them, that's some achievement.
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Stop 👏 trying 👏 to 👏 legitimise👏 word clouds.
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Won't somebody PLEASE think of the pollsters who are trying to get something topical into field.
NEW: Sources tell me that No 10 is now expecting Sue Gray report at some point TONIGHT. On a day of timetable twists and turns, the final decision on publication is in hands of PM. But expectation is it will be released in full.
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Online panels vary but two of my worst polling misses were the 2014 and 2019 European elections where we ended up in both cases significantly overstating UKIP and Brexit Party. There's something about a particular strand of Farage-fan that are really keen to do surveys.
Speaking of Reform switchers, they're most highly engaged of all groups. Which is odd given they haven't turned out at local elections. This is one for the real polling nerds but makes me worry they're over-represented in online panels; their 'true' share might be a bit lower.
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This will be the best polled constituency in the country in 2024.
LATEST SEAT PREDICTION: MILTON KEYNES NORTH. LAB @chriscurtis94 GAIN FROM CON @Ben_Everitt.MAJ: 20.4%.
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Today's key stat:. For most of 2022, the share of 2019 Conservative voters going Labour was about 8-13%. In this poll that number is 23%.
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Is there an economics podcast called ChatGDP? Feels like there should be.
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This one held up well despite having a sample size of <400.
Another one from Opinium for the Northern Powerhouse Partnership: Ben Houchen is on course to win with 63 per cent of first preferences in the Tees Valley.
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Doing a bit of digging and found our final leader approval poll from before the 2019 general election. Helpful reminder that the Boris Johnson won an 80 seat majority with a net negative approval rating
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I think there's also a simpler explanation which is that people seem to always expect the next GE to repeat the last one, like the weather:.2015 - oh it'll be a hung parliament!.2017 - another Tory majority eh?.2019 - will the minor parties manage to deny the Tories a majority?.
Also makes experienced analysts inside and outside the parties more cautious as all of them, regardless of factional or partisan allegiance, will likely have been burned on at least one of these occasions (I was in both 2015 and 2017, for example).
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If I worked in a company that put results like this out I think I'd resign in shame. Utterly appalling. Is there a comment by the chairman as well?.
54 per cent of British adults think Parliament should be suspended to prevent MPs stopping a no-deal Brexit .
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And a warm congratulations to all of the political commentators who have just discovered the definition of "reversion to the mean".
🚨🚨New Voting Intention🚨🚨.Labour lead is fifteen points in latest results from Deltapoll. Con 30% (-5).Lab 45% (-).Lib Dem 10% (+3).Other 15% (+2).Fieldwork: 24th - 27th March 2023.Sample: 1,569 GB adults.(Changes from 17th - 20th March 2023)
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Given everything we know about David Davis, his work rate, his mastery of detail, how likely is it that he just didn't understand what he'd signed up to at Chequers until he read it was bad in the Telegraph?.
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A supreme legislative branch made up of lifetime appointees, put in place by presidents who get fewer votes than their opponents and confirmed by senators who represent a minority of the population. There's a reason no sane country on earth chose to copy this institutional setup.
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It still remains astonishing that our national discourse around working from home is dominated by people who don't do normal jobs and haven't for years.
Boris Johnson: Working from home doesn't work.‘In my experience you make a coffee, go to the fridge, hack off a piece of cheese and walk very slowly back to your computer,’ he says.Read more here:.
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@youngvulgarian This is one of my "no, it's everyone else who is wrong" opinions but driving offences should be dealt with much more strictly than they are and driving bans (either temporarily or permanently) should be dished out by courts/police regularly.
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It's really useful as a control measure to put the others into context and get an idea of the baseline level of partisanship out there. Also people still mention Gordon Brown 'selling the gold' in focus groups 20 years later.
one in three blame the last Labour government for the HGV driver shortage
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Not that many times you can see naked self interest emerging in the crossbreaks but wow.
SNAP POLL: Britons are split 44% to 43% on raising National Insurance by 1.25pts to pay for NHS and social care. All Brits - 44% support / 43% oppose. Con voters - 59% / 34%.Lab voters - 33% / 55%. 18-24 yr olds - 26% / 47%.65+ yr olds - 68% / 23%.
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"So why did you guys hire Chris?"."Mainly because he goes in studs-up at the pettiest beef and I'm fully here for that".
Looks like these tweets have been taken down for breaking an embargo, but I got a screenshot so will just post them here. Why? Because if you deliberately try to line your poll up to release at the same time as ours to spike us, I will be petty.
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"unfair pressure on the officers of Durham Constabulary".
This surely puts unfair pressure on the officers of Durham Constabulary? Why not wait for officers to complete their investigation and respond to what ever happens next?.
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"Please tell us how you feel about this using one of the below pictures of former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron".
My colleague @AGKD123 has built a brilliant new framework we can use to ask to measure survey respondents' emotional reaction to stimuli.
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Glorious addition to the "Truss's ratings were so bad we thought the chart was broken" canon, you almost don't notice it, 10/10.
After 250 days as leader, Sunak's net approval stands at -23.6%, lower than any other CON/LAB leader elected since 2010 after the same period. Starmer is now approaching 1200 days as Labour leader, and has an approval of -5.5%, compared to Corbyn's -28.3% and Milibands -29.8%.
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I collect the opinions of random people who aren't on Twitter and put them into charts for the benefit of random people who are on Twitter
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The number of people with a vested interest in Britain collapsing into an American style culture war is depressingly high.
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Sam has, rather unhelpfully for us, condensed a huge amount of the advice we give to clients on how to use polling into a single article. So it's financially unwise of me to retweet it but it's a really good read so I'm doing it anyway.
New post just out. Why trying to follow public opinion too closely will end up making you very unpopular. "How not to use polling". (£/free trial).
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Helpful reminder that the most significant detail of "Boris Johnson's Brexit deal" is contained in the first two words.
This is significant for Boris Johnson. Of those who have heard about his #BrexitDeal . 90% of Conservative voters support it.73% of Leavers support it .67% of Brexit Party voters support it. Theresa May never came close to these numbers. @Survation October 18.
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"Obama was all style and no substance" says an article that manages not to mention the 2009 stimulus, Dodd Frank, Obamacare or literally any of his actual substantive achievements.
What happens when politics is style over substance: brilliant pay-off in this piece on zero-calorie Obama presidency by @Will___lloyd . “Barack Obama’s own fairytale legacy is full of holes”.
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Good case study here for why survey responses only tell you what people think *at the time of asking* and asking people to predict their own behaviour is tricky as hell.
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The sheer number of political commentators who need to Google the term "margin of error" FFS, Dom was right about you all.
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Imagine the bizarre circumstances we'd need in Britain for the electoral map to even remotely resemble the flag
Italy: High turnout in the North, low turnout in the South. #Italy #italianreferendum #referendumcostituzionale #Referendum #Italia
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A useful number to remember is 15%. That's how many Brits wanted Trump to win in 2020 (vs. 57% wanting Biden) and it was similar in 2016 and 2012. the proportion of Brits who are "right wing" by most American standards is a very vocal but very small minority.
Some really interesting comaprative analysis by @jburnmurdoch Britain is not America — and the right shouldn’t forget it
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Bit harsh to make him take the train given that we all know how Rishi feels about trains to Manchester.
Casual attire for Rishi Sunak as he arrives at Manchester Piccadilly ahead of tonight’s TV debate with Sir Keir Starmer. Carrying his own luggage too!
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Oh for christs sake it's the first question:. Remain: 42%.Leave with a deal: 30%.Leave without a deal: 20%. And yet it's being tweeted out as "Leave 50% vs. Remain 42%" as if it was asked as a referendum voting intent question.
@AGKD123 @drjennings Here we go. Let us see what delights lie within.
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Unfortunately it's not clear what share of fieldwork was before and after HMT announced they were doing an NFT.
NEW from @IpsosUK: Rishi Sunak's favourability scores fall to their lowest since he became Chancellor:. Favourable: 26% (-10 from March).Unfavourable: 44% (+11).Net: -18. Sunak has only ever had a negative favourable rating one other time in our series (-6 in Jan 2022). THREAD
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Today's chart, among 2019 Conservative voters Truss had a 26 point lead on "best PM" over Sunak in our poll two weeks ago, that's now shrunk to just 7 points.
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ALL CHANGE-- oh wait just kidding we have a 15 point lead again, everybody chill.
LATEST @OpiniumResearch / @ObserverUK poll. Public opinion stays steady as Labour’s lead holds at 15 points. Con 29% (nc).Lab 44% (nc).Lib Dems 9% (+1).Green 5% (-1).Reform UK 7% (nc)
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Opinium has a proud tradition where a general election ends up being scheduled so that a pre-booked holiday of mine occurs in the short campaign and @MrJCrouch ends up releasing a set of absolutely wild looking numbers. Anyhow, in February I'm off to Mexico for a few weeks.
🚨 NEW: At press gallery drinks in No 10 this evening, Rishi Sunak tells lobby journalists to look forward to a general election that “WILL be in 2024”. Ruling out a January 2025 election, and suggesting he may already have a date in mind….
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Again, if I or anybody I worked with was this bad at statistics we would be justifiable sacked.
The latest ONS data show that 93% of Covid deaths in April and May were of vaccinated people, in a population that is 93% vaccinated, suggesting zero protection. The same is true in each age group.
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FWIW I would take Westminster VI figures with a massive pinch of salt until well after the Euros are over.
Westminster voting intention:. LAB: 28% (-5).CON: 22% (-5).BREX: 21% (+4).LDEM: 11% (+5).GRN: 6% (+2).UKIP: 4% (-). via @OpiniumResearch, 08 May.Chgs. w/ 23 Apr.
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Love how this is a series of caricatures and then just a perfectly normal picture of Rees Mogg.
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This is really good on the whole "politics as a soap opera" style of reporting which, while it has its place, should be nowhere near as dominant in political reporting as it currently is.
The Shipman delusion: Why 'impartial' political journalism is often anything but
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@JonnElledge Jonn they didn't beat the Nazis just by sitting at home and it's the same with Covid.
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I'd counter that Keir Starmer's ratings (while better than any other party leader) are below David Cameron's in 09-10 and Tony Blair's in 96-7. But then one person's "Keir's the man for me" vote counts exactly the same as another's "could they really do any worse?" vote.
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To be honest, "People might still vote for them but they aren't popular" is a pretty good description of Boris Johnson in 2019.
💥No10 plans fresh attack operation to stunt Lib Dem fightback. David Canzini told aides they've been so focused on Labour while Lib Dems emerge as Blue Wall protest threat. Although he said: "They aren't popular. People might still vote for them, but they aren't popular.".
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Say what you will, a knighthood for Gavin Williamson probably would get people to stop talking about lockdown-breaking parties for a few minutes at least.
👀 And a knighthood for Gavin Williamson to “keep him quiet”. Tory insiders have long claimed the ex-chief whip knows too many of the skeletons still in PM’s cupboard.
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Tricky one this because yes clearly the person most responsible for Labour being 2:1 ahead is Liz Truss. But Labour being an attractive home for the voters Truss has alienated shouldn't be underrated as an achievement.
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Politically 2016 has been somewhat fraught but Gary Lineker's rebirth as the hero liberal Britain needs almost makes everything worth it
It's our constitution working the way it should. The misunderstanding, accidental or otherwise is divisive and dangerous.
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The upsetting thing about this is that it gives ammunition to a whole new generation of armchair experts saying "he who wields the knife never wears the crown" while pretending that Boris Johnson's career from 2015-2019 just didn't happen.
It's pretty clear from the polling that the main reason Sunak is doing so badly in this race is because he resigned from Johnson's cabinet.
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Yes bring back the PM who made us all have to re-do the scales on our approval rating charts.
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That our boss is a sinister billionaire who forced us to skew poll results in the Tories' favour.
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Again, who are the people betting on Michelle Obama, are they ok? and is it ethical to be basically stealing their money in such a blatant way?.
Kamala Harris is now 75% for the Democrat nomination, with some betting on the quartet of Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer
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A Notre-Dame style fire and infinitely more expensive decant-and-rebuild becomes more likely every day. Basically every British infrastructure underinvestment in microcosm.
EXC: Major restoration works on the Palace of Westminster are unlikely to progress before the next election. MPs were meant to choose a way forward this year but will now just vote for more scoping exercises.
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TBF to Gove, this is very much on the "correct way to respond to antivaxx protestors" list.
Michael Gove smokes in his rooftop smoking den - built on his departmental office roof after he was heckled by anti-vaxx protesters in 2021
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Again, we never did anything in Kensington.
@I__like__eggs I think that’s right (tho I have zero respect for opinium after the Kensington saga I think that’s the general trend).
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Unless threshold is still 20 nominations and there aren't any elected members of the 1922 left to change the rules.
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🤦♂️ this is not how polling works
1,400 people were asked in a weighted survey by BMG Research/The Independent the following :- . "Should the UK remain in the European Union, or leave the European Union ?". There are circa 5,000 followers on this Twitter Account so let's do another survey/poll - please RT.
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TBH the BBC can cancel the Mash Report and every panel show they like as long as they stop their political reporting arm from treating every stupid Twitter debate as newsworthy.
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Only thing I'll say on A50 is that "unelected" shouldn't be pejorative when applied to judges. Elected judges are a truly awful idea.
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