No monthly projections in March, as we only have one poll with regional breakdowns since February, and running the model off of one poll is counter to one of the fundamental principles of this project. I was originally planning to use this month to publish the first set of a study of the Pobal Deprivation Indices against electoral performance, but events have superseded this and I will push that back to later this year in order to put out this emergency post, which will be relatively short.
Leo Varadkar has resigned as Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael, seemingly out of the blue, and after an extremely efficiently managed process, Wicklow TD and Minister for Further Education Simon Harris emerged as the only candidate to replace him. The timing of this caught out RedC, whose monthly poll had fieldwork done before the leadership change, but Ireland Thinks managed to quickly get a short-notice poll done in the aftermath – Kevin Cunningham‘s article analysing the results is very worth reading, with further analysis supported by Stefan Müller here. The first part of this post will draw heavily on these numbers.
I’m going to cover two things in this post – firstly, the aforementioned Ireland Thinks poll, and secondly, a look at the historical impact of leadership changes on polling. Let’s get straight into it.
Ireland Thinks Post-Leadership-Change Poll
First of all, as usual, a caveat: this is one poll, the first of Harris’ leadership, and we should be very hesitant of drawing strong conclusions from such a limited amount of data. The core party polling is probably less interesting than the questions about Harris himself, but we’ll come to that later.
There is a natural instinct to directly contrast the Ireland Thinks and RedC polls. RedC has Fine Gael on 19% with Varadkar as leader, Ireland Thinks has them at 22% with Harris. Both have had FG in and around the 20% range for a while, and one shows a drop while the other shows an increase – which leads to the conclusion that Harris is the difference-maker here. The reality is, of course, not so simple.
Firstly, and this critical to note – this is a within-margin-of-error movement, in both directions. Fine Gael were averaging 19.8% nationally up to February, so seeing polling in this range is entirely normal. That said, 22% is the best result for Fine Gael since June of last year, so that’s not nothing.
Secondly, it is cited that those who switched to FG support in this poll tend to have a more positive opinion of Harris than any other cohort – 85%. This contrasts favourably with existing FG voters (71%) and the overall population (36%). While it is great to see analysis of party-switchers (something that has been sorely lacking at scale), again we must have great caution here, even within the already cautious approach to be taken to one poll. This is an extremely small sample, and while it makes rational sense that people switching to FG would have a positive view of the new leader, there is nothing to isolate this as the sole or primary cause for a change in support.
Thirdly, Ireland Thinks have again done an analysis of free-text responses. There’s a lot going on in these so pulling out insights is tricky, but we can make some conclusions. The first thing I think is notable is that when asked about Harris, the sentiment was more negative than positive – 36% expressing disappointment, lack of confidence or asking for a new election, versus 22% expressing happiness. It’s also worth noting that more people were disappointed in Harris becoming leader (28%) than were happy to see Varadkar resign (21%). Free text analysis is tricky for a variety of reasons but I think the lack of majority views on all of these points is the most telling – reactions to this are quite divided, and there doesn’t seem to be an overwhelming sentiment among all voters at this stage.
None of this is to say, of course, that Harris isn’t making, or going to make, a positive difference, and if he does, if that will endure until an election. What I am saying is that we should be cautious about data from a limited set and we don’t have enough to make it clear either way right now. What trends emerge over the next few polls will establish things more clearly.
To further illustrate: remember the post-Budget 2022 “government polling surge” that dominated media coverage to a near-hysterical degree, but disappeared entirely within four months? No of course you don’t remember, and that’s the point.
Polling on Harris as leader
In addition to this, there were a few questions about Harris himself in the poll. What is particularly notable here is that when compared to other potential leadership candidates, Harris had a decent plurality of support among FG voters (32%), while among the population at large he was in third place at 16%, behind both Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohue and Minister for Enterprise Simon Coveney.
I think this is interesting in contrast to this polling conducted by RedC in June 2023. Harris was favoured as leader of FG by 15% of all those polled. His number has barely moved even with him now assuming the leadership. Within FG however, his number has increased significantly (it was 14%), which implies that his support to be leader from non-FG voters has decreased since June.
This isn’t necessarily all bad, however. Shoring up existing support is certainly something Fine Gael need to do, as memories of their implosion during the 2020 GE campaign period will still be strong. FG dropped nearly 8 points during January and February, and a repeat would be devastating. Even though their polling has been fairly stagnant for a few years now, and they do badly need a lift, holding onto that c.20% core is crucial.
One thing that on surface looks bit more worrying however is that in head-to-head polling for preferred Taoiseach, Harris trails Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, 42% to 31%. Indeed, that’s a poor sign considering that FG have been consistently outpolling FF since pretty much directly after the last general election. However, there is a counterpoint to this: Martin has consistently had higher approval ratings than Varadkar did, going back to 2021. Harris’ situation is certainly not what he’d like to see, but he’s not in a unique position.
This shows two things: FG can beat FF even with a less popular leader and critically, that the approval of a leader of a party cannot be taken as a strong analogue for support of the party itself.
Finally it’s worth noting that while there was a 16% increase in the number of people calling for an immediate GE (total: 35%), this is still very far from a majority, and while this was the case with a prompted question, only 3% put it in the free text responses, which indicates that the sentiment, while strengthening, likely isn’t a priority for people in terms of the switch from Varadkar to Harris.
So the conclusion of this section is the same as above: there are indicators that can be read positively or negatively, and also good reasons to not read those indicators at all at this stage. What we have here is a lot of competing possibilities, and only further time and data will show which ones of those are informing people’s political preferences.
Historical Party Leader Changes and Polling
To further contextualise the early indications, it is useful to look at the effect party leader changes have had on polling on the past. It is worth noting, of course, that the circumstances of each of these changes are different, both in terms of the timing, reasons and political environment. Therefore these should be viewed as illustrative of potentials, rather than predictive of what will happen. We’ll take one example from each of FG and FF.
Firstly let’s look at Fine Gael themselves and their prior leadership change in 2017, where Leo Varadkar succeeded Enda Kenny. At the time, FG were leading a minority coalition government, supported by FF via a confidence & supply arrangement. FG were coming off a poor election, dealing with major scandals and stagnant support. Kenny narrowly survived a confidence vote in February, before opting to resign in May. This uses the five polls prior and after the change in leadership:
As can be seen, in the aftermath of the change there wasn’t an immediately appreciable shift, as Fine Gael were already on an upward track around the time; indeed, support initially fell off a bit, but within MoE. It wasn’t until later, in September, that the upward trend began to clearly emerge, and even then it wobbled until 2018, where FG support settled solidly into the mid-30s. Of course, by the time we got to an election in 2020, Fine Gael’s support cratered, leading to their worst ever election result – 20.9%.
It is worth noting that Varadkar had a lot more time before his first election as leader than Harris does now; Varadkar had enough time to go through a whole lifecycle of being around where his predecessor was, peaking comfortably above that a short while later, before collapsing in the face of an actual election. Whether this timescale is compressed or not for this next election remains to be seen.
Going back further to Fianna Fáil’s last leadership change. Micheál Martin took over following a disastrous election in 2011. This is a bit harder to unpick as there were a ton of polls shortly before the election (13 in February alone!) which throws off the timeframe for using the last five. Thus, to make it make sense, I have taken the average of polling of each of the five months prior to the election:
Note here that the change made absolutely no statistically significant difference for FF – they continued struggling on after changing leaders, and there was no appreciable change in support levels until 2013. This change fluctuated and faded, but FF did ultimately end up beating their polling in 2016.
This is another potential outcome with Harris – a long period of stagnation, but again we must bear in mind the circumstances are different. Similar to Varadkar, Martin had a lot more time before the next election, and also had the benefit of being in opposition. He also had the additional benefit of expectations for his party being at an all-time low, coming off a decimation at the polls and bereft of identity or direction.
The Fine Gael party that Harris inherits is not in such a weak position; expectations are higher from both supporters and representatives, and despite the strangely online ranting emanating from certain backbenchers, the party does have a strong identity. It’s not yet clear what Harris will make of it – there can be no accurate prediction of the shape of things to come at this stage. It is both in his hands and out of them – the next few months will tell as we see how the voting public reacts to not only what he does, but to what comes from the party he now leads.
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