Opinion polls relating to voter preference on a UK wide basis at Westminster elections are now published about 8 times a month. When there is a General Election campaign, the polls are published every day In Northern Ireland, we don’t have any.
This is probably because as a region, we are not large enough for an opinion poll on our region to “stand alone” news report. Opinion polls cost a lot of money. They are not simple interviews. The cost includes the research which goes into making the samples representative and accurate.
We are not going to persuade the newspapers to conduct opinion polls. What about the Conservative Party?
Normally, a political party will have a feel for voter preference from canvass returns. In Northern Ireland, the parties may be able to gauge some sort of movement within their own community. However, that information is never published. It is purely to help the tactics of the party concerned.
There is another reason why opinion polls could be very important. In Northern Ireland, there is evidence that the public do vote according to who they think are the strongest party representing their community. In a survey conducted by Northern Ireland Life and Times people were asked which political party they felt closest to.
In the survey, the SDLP was ahead of Sinn Fein in this survey and the UUP was very close to the DUP. These results were not reflected in the 2007 Assembly elections, held within a month of the survey. It was also noticeable that in that election, both the DUP and Sinn Fein fought the election on the basis of “getting the biggest vote”
It may well be that many voters in the 2007 elections voted according to who they thought would win. Had opinion polls been published immediately prior to the election, the result might have been different. I say “might” because the question in the NILT survey did not say “who would you actually vote for if there was an election?”. There is another compelling reason why I believe opinion polls are needed. We are trying to break the mould of tribal politics. If the Northern Ireland public are able to see from published opinion polls that they are not the only people thinking in a certain way, a breakthrough could certainly be on the cards.
To the Conservative Party, I rest my case.
Filed under: Conservative Party, Conservative Party Policy, DUP, European Elections, General Election, Normal Politics, Northern ireland, Sinn Fein Tagged: | Conservative Party, Conservative Party Policy, DUP, European Elections, General Election, Normal Politics, Northern ireland, Northern Ireland politics, Opinion poll, SDLP, Sinn Fein, Tory-UUP linkup
