Good afternoon. It’s been a while, and there’s been no monthly update to the projections since October. Why? I’ll explain below. But as it is, I felt that not posting again before the end of the year would be bad, so here’s a round up of one or two miscellaneous pieces.
B&A acquisition and future impact
So as mentioned above, why no update for a while? Very simply, there has only been one poll with data breakdowns since then (there have been two without from Ireland Thinks). I suspect this is due to B&A’s acquisition by IPSOS. As IPSOS already do (infrequent) polling for the Irish Times, it is unclear if B&A will continue to do so for the Sunday Times, and given a lack of B&A polls since the acquisition, the outlook does not good.
This will leave RedC as the only consistent polling company that puts out regional breakdowns. I really would like Ireland Thinks – as they are a high quality pollster – to do the same, but they don’t, and their reasons are sound enough (sample size). IPSOS themselves only seem to put out polls quarterly if at all, and if B&A stop polling the end result of this means a lot less data is available.
What this means for the model is that it’s going to have less information to work off, there is a much greater risk of error from RedC’s house effects, reduction in overall sampling pool, and also puts the polling average into problematic territory as it increases the length of the “lookback”. More precisely, without B&A, expect to see better polling for Fine Gael and the Soc Dems, and worse polling for Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin.
Beyond that, I’m not sure a monthly cadence makes sense for the website anymore. Updating for one poll at a time is a problem that this entire project was designed to negate. I will have to review this, and maybe switch to quarterly updates while trying to do include more project-type things like I used to back in the early days of this site. We’ll see. Either way, this is not good news for me.
Leaked EU Election poll for Dublin
Not too long ago, we had an EU Election poll taken by Ireland Thinks leaked (allegedly by Fine Gael, which as we’ll see below is odd) for the Dublin constituency. This is handy for me because of the way Dublin is drawn – it’s significantly more simple to put together a projection for than South or Midlands-North-West. I should point out, similar to my local elections post, using national polls to project European elections is not wise, but I’m going to do a comparative here to illustrate a few points that I think are interesting. Firstly, the results off the poll versus what the projections would show if applied to the European elections (and again I should note that the projections are not designed to apply to European elections):
Using the swing between polling at the point of the 2019 European election and current polling shows quite a gap to the leaked poll in most cases. That should not be surprising of course – the polls are for GEs, and the European elections didn’t even align all that closely with the locals held on the same day let alone on national sentiment. But I have included this because it illustrates some interesting points I’ll discuss below.
First off, however, we must note a couple of things. The sample size for the leaked poll was really small – less than 400 people – which carries a large MoE. While this isn’t disproportionate for a sample in Dublin in any given national poll, with national polls we can aggregate to increase the pool. Here we cannot and are faced with a single poll, so caution should be exercised interpreting this at all times (something the Irish Independent, sadly, did not show in their coverage of this, but I have spoken enough times about the Irish media’s inability or unwillingness to handle polling figures responsibly, so let’s not rehash that again).
There are also things that have changed or may change since this poll – Sinn Féin are running a second candidate (Cllr Daithí Doolan), Labour will likely have a higher-profile candidate than Senator Annie Hoey in TD Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, and many of the candidates for non-incumbent parties are not decided yet. The poll also appears to have been limited to a list of eight candidates; last time around the seat was contested by no less than 19 people, and I honestly expect more this time. While most of them were no-hopers, non-Daly independents and minor parties still accounted for over 10% of FPV. Finally, Dublin is a four-seater so really other than SF and FF, nobody is shown as guaranteed a seat by this leaked poll.
With all that in mind, I’ll go through this by each party:
- This is a really good poll for Sinn Féin and tracks more closely with their current polling in Dublin than for any other party. However, that is under the assumption that Senator Lynn Boylan is the only candidate. This number is a lock for one candidate. For two? Much less comfortable. There is a fair assumption to be made that a second candidate could add additional votes from their area, but this is far from guaranteed and if SF want to pick up two seats, they are likely going to have to significantly outperform this number on polling day. No party has won two European seats in Dublin since Fianna Fáil in 1984, and that was with over 33% of FPV.
- This is also an unexpectedly strong poll for Fianna Fáil, who aren’t polling well in Dublin in general. Incumbent Barry Andrews doesn’t strike me as exactly the highest profile MEP around, and he scraped in last time owing to an expanded seat added post-Brexit, but this is a really strong showing and indicative of a theme that will be repeated a few times below: the right candidate can make a huge difference, either positively or negatively. This is universally true but tends to get averaged out by the aggregates during GEs and LEs. But EEs and by-elections provide much clearer illustrations of this. If this poll is accurate, Andrews is likely to top the poll in a scenario with two SF candidates, which would be a huge result (and PR coup) for a Fianna Fáil party that is struggling for a win. Alternative conspiracy theory explanation: A number of the people polled muddled him up with his cousin Chris.
- Clare Daly (Independents4Change) is difficult to assess in a poll that included no other Independent or Other options – it’s a very positive poll for sure, but its difficult to say definitively that this is all people who would vote for her if there were other those choices available. On the flip side, one could say that even if the number is inflated by the nature of the poll, it’s a good indicator that she would expect a lot of transfers if and when those other options got eliminated. So there’s a positive interpretation to this data whatever way you look at it, and she would be a strong candidate to keep her seat if the poll’s numbers are accurate. The gap to the projections shouldn’t be very surprising – Daly is far more popular than a generic “Independent/Other” candidate. That again speaks to the extreme difficulty involved in projecting for Independents, and why I believe modelling will always underestimate high profile ones to some degree.
- As mentioned above, it is claimed that Fine Gael – or more precisely, one of the Fine Gael candidates – leaked this poll. To which I can only ask what the hell they were thinking? This is an awful poll for Fine Gael. The seat previously held by Frances Fitzgerald now looks extremely vulnerable. And the poll gave a choice of FG candidates with TDs Colm Brophy (12%) and Josepha Madigan (10.6%) doing worse than ex-TD and professional drone lobbyist Noel Rock. All of these, it must be said, are weak candidates compared to Fitzgerald. So once again, FG have opted for a clownshow, and whichever one of the three camps leaked this poll is being thoroughly idiotic – these numbers don’t make any of them look good. I’m getting a real sense of a repeat of the Dublin Bay South by-election, where a weak candidate and public infighting did a huge amount of damage to FG in a place where they should be pretty strong. A result like this – even if they do manage to hold the seat at the end – would be disastrous, particularly because Dublin is the only region where FG polling is holding up well since the last GE.
- PBP/Solidarity is a very clear illustration again of candidate strength. TD Paul Murphy doing significantly better than a projection based on the two random candidates they ran in 2019 should not be a surprise, particularly given he and fellow TD Bríd Smith combined for over 15% in 2014 (although them running against eachother was not a good idea). Murphy certainly has a decent shot a seat here if he goes for it, but honestly, would he? I don’t know – and it’s very, very likely that PBPS would not be able to hold his Dáil seat in a by-election if he were to go to Europe. Not much else to say here – but it is worth noting as well that high-profile left-wing candidates who run competent campaigns regularly overperform in EEs when compared to GEs.
- After sweeping to a poll-topping performance in 2019, this isn’t a great poll for incumbent Green MEP Ciarán Cuffe. Similar to Fine Gael, Dublin is where the Green vote is most resilient currently so this would be a pretty significant underperformance if it were to bear out. It’s not a sign of the seat being gone and Cuffe would most certainly be competitive on these numbers, but it would be a scrap for the final seat after being elected extremely comfortably last time. On a more positive interpretation, these numbers still don’t indicate the total wipeout of the Greens that some people are expecting to happen – they should still be expected to be competitive in Dublin where they hold seats, across Europe, the Dáil and local councils.
- The Social Democrats man, I really don’t know sometimes. I suppose at best one can say that like other smaller left-wing parties, they are very highly candidate dependent, but at some point you have to start having new faces show they can make breakthroughs if they want to aspire to be something bigger than they currently are. Their polling in Dublin is relatively strong based on their past performances, so the result of the leaked poll ought be really disappointing. Sarah Durcan is much less high-profile than 2019 candidate TD Gary Gannon, and while he didn’t do very well either, that was in a worse polling environment for the SDs. Durcan has been an unsuccessful candidate in a local, a general and a by-election at this stage, and the SD campaign in the latter was notably poor; if the SDs are serious about challenging for a seat here (and honestly they may not be prioritising it, which is an understandable strategy), they would probably benefit from a candidate with more of a profile.
- Finally, Labour. This is also a poor result given that Dublin is their best region, particularly since Bacik took over as leader. As mentioned above however they could end up with a candidate with a bigger profile in TD Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, but they had a poor go of it in 2019 with a well-known ex-TD as well, so it’s hard to pin this on Senator Annie Hoey. This just seems really tough for them and the party continues to show it is, at best, stagnant, and at worst, declining. There’s been very little to indicate they have capitalised on their DBS by-election win in 2021.
The Far-Right and Sinn Féin
In February 2021, I did a piece analysing transfers to and from far-right parties and candidates. I didn’t publish it because those parties were electorally utterly insignificant. Recent events have changed that dynamic, as they have started showing at a low, but visible, level in the Other category of polls, and also fascists managed to set fire to Dublin recently in a disgraceful outburst of directionless, racist anger. I still believe they are mostly a non-factor electorally until we see a sustained differentiation in polling, but it’s been seized on by sections of the media to tie support-base links between Sinn Féin and the far-right.
This isn’t completely without foundation. Issue polling has repeatedly shown SF voters to the right of other parties on immigration, SF has failed to deal effectively (or at all) with representatives in its own party who have expressed far-right opinions, and there is some notable transfer overlap. All these indicate that SF will lose some votes to the far-right. But – and this is a huge but – it is lacking crucial context because some or all of those same indicators also point to other parties support bases, in some cases more so than Sinn Féin’s. I’m still reluctant to go too much into depth with this here, but I will be talking about it on the Tortoise Shack this week, so keep an eye out for that.
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Irish Election Projections 