Earlier today, YouGov released an interesting poll commissioned for the People’s Vote campaign. In addition to the standard headline polling figures, they asked 5043 voters to supposed various parties were campaigning for getting on with Brexit or advocating a second referendum on the subject.
Headline Projection
The first question was the standard question on how you would vote if there were a general election tomorrow, in order to provide a baseline for the rest of the questions. It would imply another hung parliament, with the only meaningful net change from last year’s election being a swing from Labour to the SNP in Scotland. (There are some interesting regional swings in here, but that’s a topic for another day.)
If Labour supported a People’s Vote
The next question asked how people would vote if the Conservatives supported going ahead with Brexit, whereas Labour, the Lib Dems, SNP and Plaid Cymru all supported a second referendum. It appears for these questions that UKIP and the Green Party were not listed as explicit options (whereas they were for the headline question), but as Other instead, which presents some confusion in the data tables.
The tables suggest that Labour supporting a second referendum would attract around 1 in 6 LibDem voters to their party. Despite this, the national figures put Labour and the LibDems flat and the Tories up (maybe due to lack of UKIP/Green options). I suspect, if all parties were listed explicitly in this question, we would see little change from the headline figure.
If Labour supported Brexit
The next question asked how people would vote if the Conservatives and Labour both supported getting on with Brexit, while the Lib Dems, SNP and Plaid Cymru supported a second referendum.
Such a policy shift would see approximately 1 in 3 Labour voters defect to the Lib Dems, which would put the in second place in the national vote. However, when you look at the seats that the Lib Dems marginally lost last year, there are a lot more Conservative seats than Labour seats. Meanwhile, despite the Tories being little changed, they would take enough seats to show Labour their worst result since World War II.
As Jeremy Corbyn considers whether to table a no-confidence against the government in the coming days, he will have to consider exactly where his party stands on Brexit, and whether a second referendum is something he wants to deliver.
YouGov does not normally publish seat projections outside of a general election. These seat projections were generated using a uniform swing within each region of the poll.
