How will the Greens do?

Plus the Survation MRP and the godawful leaders debate

The bulk of today’s post is by Josh and looks at the Green vote in detail. Where is it coming from? What seats are they challenging for? Will they get their best ever general election vote share?

But before we get to that, we had yet another MRP last night from Survation. Interestingly this one had a similar number of Tory seats to Electoral Calculus (71 vs 66) but on a similar vote share to YouGov (19pts vs 18pts). That indicates some significant methodological differences, which we’ll come back to at the weekend. It shouldn’t be automatically dismissed as implausible, though, their data scientist is Chris Hanretty, who has more experience in doing UK MRPs than anyone.

Subscriber Peter Inglesby has built this excellent aggregator so you can see all the different MRP and model predictions for each constituency alongside each other.

In other news there was a debate between Starmer and Sunak on ITV last night. I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t have to watch it for professional reasons would have lasted more than fifteen minutes. It was dire. A YouGov snap poll gave it 51% to 49% to Sunak. Starmer did much better on likeability and being “in touch with ordinary people”. A Savanta poll gave it to Starmer 44% to 39% and also had Starmer ahead on every issue and characteristic, mostly by a lot. My hypothesis is people tend to judge “who won the debate” on quite narrow criteria that doesn’t necessarily relate to what they want in a prime minister.

I cannot imagine it will change many votes. My main takeaway was how deeply frustrating it is that TV execs feel the need to present politics in such a trivialising format.