February 2024 Projections Update

Seat Map

There were three polls in February – from Ireland Thinks, RedC and B&A. As usual, only the latter two have regional breakdowns, so the first one is not factored into the modelling. Last month I said I may switch to quarterly if B&A didn’t produce monthly polls – and their cadence moving forward isn’t clear, as the Irish Times did not commission monthly polls in the past. However, that is moot right now, so we will have this update and see what the frequency is in future.

All three polls do point towards last month’s big talking point – Sinn Féin’s 25% result in RedC – as being a low-end outlier, while still indicating that their support is more likely to be in the upper-20s than the lower-30s. Their polling average on my calculation is 28.7%, which feels about right. While not an encouraging trend for them, this still has them comfortably ahead of their main rivals in Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – indeed, both FF and FG are also seeing stagnant polling (technically declining, but by such small amounts that it’s not significant in any way).

It’s also worth noting that the second much-ballyhooed part of last month’s RedC poll, the additional support for Independents, Others and Aontú, has either reversed or stalled – although I would argue, as I did last month, that it was never statistically sound enough to draw such conclusions from in the first place. This also pretty much sweeps away the explanatory claims being made last month too; if they were true, the situation would have endured.

RedC avoid discussing any of this this month, instead focusing entirely on their polling on the upcoming referendums (which I will talk about later). Depending on your outlook, you may view this non-acknowledgement as clever or cynical, but either way it’s understandable and I hope they’ve learned from this, as they are genuinely very good at what they do and should not risk undermining that.

But yeah, once again, the most important mantra in analysing polling holds true: never, ever draw major conclusions from the result of a single poll.

As a note, I have broken out the new “Independent Ireland” party (previously grouped under “Independent/Other”); currently this party holds three seats. This is why the overall Independent/Other count has decreased while showing gains this period. In terms of polling, this group is not polled separately at the moment, so they will be treated the same way Right2Change are, i.e. their polling average will be based on Independent/Other.

A couple of thoughts to follow, but if you would prefer to skip straight to the seat changes, click here.

Purple Reign

All of the preamble above does pose one question – if Sinn Féin still aren’t doing that well, and Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil aren’t benefitting, who is? Well, while some recent things have been overstated, it is undeniable that Independents are pulling support from the major parties and trending upwards, but we have talked about that a few times now. I want to go back to something we’ve touched on before – it’s not necessarily apparent from the headline figures, but something very interesting is happening with the Social Democrats.

Soc Dem support peaked up when Holly Cairns took leadership of the party, pretty much exactly one year ago, and then proceeded to drop off, before starting to trend back up since October. As of now it’s back towards the upper bounds of SD polling performance – indeed, this is the highest it’s been since April 2021. But when we look at overall figures, we are only seeing part of the story. What is more interesting is what’s happening in Dublin and Munster.

The February RedC poll has them at 13% in Dublin. Now, natural caveat is that this must be considerd and outlier at the upper bound, especially with an oddly low Labour score in the same poll. However, that said, it’s their highest ever result in the capital, and more importantly comes in the context that their polling average in Dublin has never been higher than it is right now, clocking in at 8.4%. That puts them in the territory where they are likely to gain seats – which the model reflects at the moment.

Similarly, in Munster, the SDs are at an all-time high in the polling average, sitting at 4.9%. This is less spectacular, but is the kind of numbers that indicate them being very competitive in places like Cork North-Central (I still think the model is overestimating them there somewhat) and Limerick City. It’s also worth noting that if this increases further, I expect the model will have some kind of breakdown over Cork North-West, which I am not looking forward to having to resolve.

The big question here, to loop back to the start of the section, is where is that support coming from? The immediate instinct is to look at SF. In Dublin I’m not sure that is the case – SF improved marginally there this month – and it looks more correlated to drops for the other smaller centre-left parties, i.e. the Greens and Labour. However, in Munster there does seem to be a degree of correlation between declining SF and rising SD support, although far from enough to be concrete on at this stage. Either way, this requires more time and data before it can be declared a trend with any degree of confidence, but it’s something worth continuing to look at if these patterns endure.

Referendum polling

As mentioned in the intro to this piece, RedC did some polling on the two upcoming referendums, and found majority support for both. And just today – I’m having to re-write this section because of it – Ireland Thinks released on showing plurality support. The latter poll shows a significant increase in people moving to “don’t know/won’t vote”.

This is unusual as typically these numbers drop as you get closer to polling day, but perhaps more than anything else is a reflection of a lethargic campaign where the most prominent members both of the Yes and No sides appear to have been sort of going through the motions.

While naturally the polls are more positive for the Yes side of both upcoming votes, this should not be taken as a guarantee, as you’ll see in the second part of this section. You would rather be in the government’s position on these numbers, for sure, and it would be far from a surprise to see both pass, but these levels of Yes support show pretty low enthusiasm.

There is one other thing to consider – given the general lethargy around the campaign one might expect a low turnout event. However, there has been a surge in voter registration. For this, at least some credit must go to the new Electoral Commission, whose registration campaign has been far more visible for most of the period than any of the various Yes or No efforts. Whether or not these newly registered people actually vote or not remains to be seen, but could have impact.

But this did make me think of something – is polling on referendums actually accurate? We know that polling on general elections is historically quite good, polling on European elections is historically not as good (something I’m hoping Ireland Thinks and The Journal can remedy this cycle with monthly polling), but what about referendums? So I did some digging, and:

First, a note on methodology – this used the three most recent polls preceding a referendum vote (unless less polls were available, or unless >3 polls were doing simultaneous fieldwork). The figures were then normalised to exclude don’t knows/abstains/other, and rounded to the nearest figure. This isn’t a perfect measure but it gives a reasonable idea of where the polls were preceding the vote. Note that for some referenda (e.g. 31st amendment) I could not find polling data and thus they are not included in this.

Secondly, the answer is “maybe, sometimes?”. Broadly speaking, the polls have got the answer right. Of the three times they didn’t, one is understandable: the 28th (Lisbon I) had very close polling, with some polls correctly showing the No side winning. The other two are a bit harder to understand.

On the 32nd (Seanad abolition), one could say that they got the overall Yes vote around right, but “don’t knows” went overwhelmingly for No. That’s not beyond the realms of possibility. The 31st I (Oireachtas inquiries) is however, crazy. There wasn’t much polling, but it all showed an absolute majority for Yes, even including “don’t knows”. B&A had Yes at 76% four days before the vote. So that’s pretty bad.

But leaving aside the Yes/No question, the polling has generally been pretty off for referendums, usually overstating the Yes vote. There’s dynamics that explain this to an extent – unconvinced people will frequently decide late to vote No, but a lot of these gaps are quite large and that doesn’t explain the scale of some of these misses.

In conclusion, polling on referendums seems quite difficult, despite the binary questions.

Finally, moving away from polling numbers but still on the topic of the referendum questions, it should be noted that per RedC, Sinn Féin voters less supportive than Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael’s in both cases. Perhaps there is some degree of general anti-government sentiment, and the Carers referendum in particular has attracted justificable controversy over the wording. But less SF voters supporting what is definitely a more progressive definition of the family? That’s not what I expected.

Environmental polling

One brief, final note on issue polling – RedC also asked two questions related to green initiatives. The first was about the passenger cap in Dublin Airport, the second about car restrictions in Dublin City. And if you’re someone with green sentiments, it’s concerning. A strong plurality support increasing the former, and the latter is evenly split between for, against and neutral/don’t know.

Also one might ask what the value of asking people from outside Dublin about traffic management plans in Dublin is. That’s a good question, but Dublin actually has the highest rate of opposition to these restrictions (although not the lowest level of support, or net result). There is still a gap it seems between even low-level environmental changes and convincing people that these will not negatively impact them. It does not seem that the Green Party’s stint in government has been able to bring people along with these measures. It will be interesting to see how a government without them in it chooses to proceed, particularly if Sinn Féin, whose representatives are quite divided on these issues, are part of it.

Also! Sinn Féin voters, again, far less supportive of the traffic restrictions than Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil voters. That said, they are also less supportive of increasing the passenger cap. It does feel like there’s a higher degree of opposing things in general among SF voters in these polls. Independents track similarly as well. I suppose this is understandable for supporters of those not in government, even if it isn’t particularly coherent in a big-picture sense.

Seat Changes

There are six changes in total this month, in five constituencies – two are in Waterford.

Clicking on the linked name for each constituency should jump to the relevant section of this page. Changes on this page indicate changes from January 2024’s projections; changes on constituency pages indicate changes from current composition.

Note: The projections reflect, and always have reflected, most likely outcomes. So if a final seat is more likely for candidate X over Y, the model will show X winning the seat.

This does not mean the scenario where Y wins doesn’t exist, or even is necessarily unlikely (there’s a lot of marginal calls!). It also does not mean that every single “most likely” scenario will come true; statistically that in and of itself is probably not going to happen. This is true from from a simple probability point of view, even if we ignore deficiencies in underlying data. A projected result merely means that the model thinks X winning is the most likely outcome.

• Cork North-Central (PBP +1, FG -1)
• Dublin Bay North (SF +1, FF -1)
• Dublin South-West (SD +1, LAB -1)
• Kerry (FG +1, SF -1)
• Waterford (FG +1, IND +1, SF -1, FF -1)

Cork North-Central came up last month as a bit of an odd one, and it’s even more true this month, as the model favours PBP/Solidarity’s Mick Barry to hold his seat again, with Fine Gael’s Colm Burke losing out. All of this is within very fine margins, and there are essentially seven candidates that are possibly viable for five seats here, and there are plenty of possible configurations to that, with really only one Sinn Féin and one Fianna Fáil seat looking guaranteed.

I do think that the model is probably overestimating the Social Democrats a bit here – and have discussed the reasons for this before a few times now, so I won’t rehash. I will however again emphasise that, as noted previously, there is more margin for error in a redrawn constituency than otherwise. It’s also worth saying that this is one of those tight races where the model has transfers mattering a lot, and transfers should naturally be treated with more caution than first preference votes when it comes to projections. I would advise caution here.

Seán Haughey (Fianna Fáil)’s retirement makes the difference here. FF have been narrowly favoured to hold this seat for a while now, but without an incumbent TD their chances drop, though they are still fairly close. The Social Democrat seat here looks safer than ever before with current strong polling in Dublin, leaving the final two seats between Labour, a second Sinn Féin candidate and Fianna Fáil.

In FF’s favour, they have plenty of local councillors in the area – including former Lord Mayor of Dublin Tom Brabazon. They also got the highest share of first preference vote in three of the four LEAs that wholly or partially are in the constituency. So I wouldn’t say there’s no hope for them, but they are certainly up against it. This is a persistently competitive constituency and they almost certainly would not have retained a seat there in 2020 if Sinn Féin had run two candidates.

Also, not relevant to anything projection-wise, but might be of interest to some people: this might be the end of the Lemass/Haughey dynasty, unless unsuccessful 2019 LE candidates Hannah Lemass or Cathal Haughey opt to continue to run.

Well, that Labour seat projection didn’t last too long, as the high-water-mark in Dublin polling for the Social Democrats sees them favoured for the last seat here this month. Most of the factors highlighted last month still very much apply here, and this is far from clear cut, but between the Greens, Labour and the Soc Dems there’s a lot of centre-left transfers available, and past data indicates that they are more likely to transfer to eachother before going to Sinn Féin or People Before Profit. Still, a second seat for SF ahead of any of the centre-left parties remains a distinct possibility.

Sinn Féin’s polling is dropping in Munster, and has been for a little bit, so it was inevitable with that trend continuing that we would start to see them losing out in constituencies where they were projected to win multiple seats. Kerry makes sense as being one of these. In 2020, had they run a second candidate, there’s no guarantee they would have got in (they only had 1.21 quotas), they got less votes than Fianna Fáil (which was hidden somewhat by FF running too many candidates) and of course there are highly entrenched Independent candidates there that can outcompete them for anti-government votes.

Fine Gael move up not so much of the back of any increases of their own, but from simply being best placed to benefit from an SF drop. We are of course in a situation where their incumbent TD is retiring, so while the model tries to account for this, it does introduce a greater amount of uncertainty.

This website has been going for over three years, and the third projected Sinn Féin seat in Waterford remained stubbornly modelled, but for the first time, it’s gone. I think it’s probably fair to say on some level that this was an artefact of the model that I couldn’t fairly resolve but actually wasn’t likely in reality. But regardless it’s a notable point in terms of SF’s declining support in Munster. Based on transfer analysis, these newly eliminated SF votes would favour incumbent Independent TD Matt Shananhan over Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, and would be enough to hold his seat. I would of course note that there is not guarantee SF actually run three candidates here; with two, the transfer dynamics could be quite different.

Also, with FF dropping down a bit in Munster too, that puts them behind FG for the last seat. It is completely within the realms of possibility that they are both able to win a seat ahead of Shanahan, but for now the modelling gives him an edge. Also don’t exclude either FF or FG doing something sub-optimal with their candidate numbers here.

Other notes

• European Elections: I think Fianna Fáil might have lost the plot entirely here, as their moves in Midlands North-West are extremely hard to understand. After possibly costing themselves a seat by running two candidates in 2019, they have opted to run three this time (albeit with an extra seat). They added both unsuccessful candidates from the selection convention – Senators Lisa Chambers and Niall Blaney – to the ticket to join convention winner Barry Cowen TD. Whether this is due to overambition, factional disputes or attempting to keep everyone happy, it doesn’t seem like a good move. FF have no chance of winning three seats here, and even two seems difficult. Running three candidates, based on their current polling, only makes it harder.
• Cavan-Monaghan: Aontú have been having some improved polling in Connacht-Ulster and this remains their most likely target for gaining a second seat. However, even in a more positive polling environment, there are a lot of barriers to overcome. I wouldn’t expect change here unless we see one of the big three slide, although Fianna Fáil are going to have a nightmare if both their incumbent TDs insist on running, which could long-shot open the door to a 5th seat if they don’t manage it well.
• Limerick City: The model continues to show the Social Democrats getting closer here. There is a way to go, but if they end up overhauling a second Sinn Féin candidate, that’s a big milestone for both parties’ fortunes in Munster. If there is validity to the theory that SF is leaking support in Munster directly to the SDs, this could be a surprise.
• Tipperary South: Séamus Healy (Workers and Unemployed Action – but ran as an Independent last time) is very close to overhauling Fine Gael for the final seat here under the model. That said, there’s an awful lot of unknowns following the split of Tipperary, so ultimately nothing would surprise me here.

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