LucidTalk’s latest survey is providing headlines for the Belfast Telegraph all week. Their voting intentions survey published in today’s paper shows the uphill struggle [Ed – or opportunity?] parties would have to motivate the electorate to positively engage in an election.
[Excluding people who would not vote] Overall the figures for the five Executive parties, with the 2011 vote in brackets, are DUP 29.3% (30%), Sinn Fein 26.1% (26.9%), UUP 10.8% (13.2%), SDLP 13.8% (14.2%) and Alliance 10.2% (7.7%). Forty-five per cent of Alliance support is concentrated in South and East Belfast.
Smaller parties which did not stand everywhere last time include the Greens (1.3%), Ukip (1.6%), NI21 (4.7%) and TUV (2.2%). This is a creditable start for NI21, the new party started by Basil McCrea and John McCallister.
In short it’s bad for the UUP, good for Alliance, and encouraging for NI21. The TUV will be rubbing their ankles as UKIP nip them. The Greens must be disappointed to be in last place.
The Belfast Telegraph note that NI21 “broke into double percentage points” in their two MLAs’ constituencies “where they got 15.6% support”.
Bill White segments the non-voters into helpful categories: Doers, Don’t Knows, Unpluggeds, Irritables, Alienateds. There’s further analysis from Liam Clarke looking at the socio-economic groups, gender, age and religion.
- 51% of the AB groups (Professional and Managerial) say they won’t vote compared to 39% of DE.
- Women are also less likely to vote than men in the proportion of 51% to 36%.
- 52% of the 18-24 age-groups said they wouldn’t bother voting, compared with 40% of the 45-64 age-group, and 38% of the 65+ age-group.
- 41% of Protestants said they wouldn’t vote compared with 37% of Catholics. In contrast, 56% who gave their religion as ‘other’ and 55% who said ‘none’ don’t intend voting.
[Image embedded from Belfast Telegraph article.]
Alan Meban. Tweets as @alaninbelfast. Blogs about cinema and theatre over at Alan in Belfast. A freelancer who writes about, reports from, live-tweets and live-streams civic, academic and political events and conferences. He delivers social media training/coaching; produces podcasts and radio programmes; is a FactCheckNI director; a member of Ofcom’s Advisory Committee for Northern Ireland; and a member of the Corrymeela Community.
Discover more from Slugger O'Toole
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.