We are still almost a year and a half away from the Assembly and Council elections, but the parties will already be seriously considering how best to position themselves in the eyes of the voters.
Opinion polls will play a major part in their considerations. A good score means a party is on the right track to maximise its vote. While a bad one will leave it asking what, or who, has to change.
The problem for the parties is that it takes time to change public perception, and time is rapidly running out.
So what does the latest LucidTalk poll, in Monday’s Belfast Telegraph, tell us?
Remember, as usual the margin of error is 2.3% either up or down. Also that all figures are rounded to the nearest percentage point, which means that a party that scores 10.45% in November and 10.50% in January will be shown as having gained a point, although they have virtually stood still. So it is almost always silly to fixate on the size of movement since the last poll. What really matters is the pattern of movement, or nonmovement, over a period of time.
In terms of movement since the last poll the greatest interest is to be found amongst the Unionist parties. The DUP and UUP are each up 1%, while the TUV has dropped 2%.
That 1% for the DUP is significant only because if follows a pattern. It suggests that the party is on an upward swing. However, it will need to add a further 2%, and hold on to it, before it can have reasonable hopes of matching its 2022 Assembly performance, which was itself the worst since 1998.
It will need a further 2% if it hopes to maintain its representation on local Councils.
The question for the party is whether their current tactics of upping the agro with nationalism, and Sinn Féin in particular, will be powerful enough to earn all those extra points.
Is there any life left in their traditional election message that a vote for the DUP is the only way to keep out Sinn Féin. How well will that work when Sinn Féin are already in, and the DUP is still 6% points behind them in the polls? And when the unionist vote is split between three parties which each appears capable of taking a fair slice of the available unionist seats?
The obvious question TUV will be asking itself is how do they pull back to 13%? Or is this just a blip which they should ignore, rather than risk adjusting the formula which had served it well since the DUP went back into the Executive? Is the Sea Border’s ability to shift unionist voters weakening, even though the continuous regulatory divergence between the UK and the EU makes that Border stronger. And will the DUP be able to spin any reset that Keir Starmer achieves with the EU – “don’t look at the fact that the Sea Border did not disappear when we told you we had abolished it. Just be grateful that it’s not as bad as it was.”
Of far greater importance to the DUP is to figure out how to avoid the pre-election fade which they suffered in 2022? How do they stoke the fires of resentment towards the DUP, and keep them banked up right through to polling day?
That fade, denied them the chance to gain any seats. But if they can keep above 9% they are almost guaranteed gains, while their current 11% still carries the potential to put DUP losses into high single figures.
It is wrong to assume that the 1% increase in the UUP share is due to their new leader. The poll was taken just as it became clear that Jon Burrows was to be elected unopposed, and it is possible that the extra attention paid to the party did help. But the signs of possible movement were there even before Mike Nesbitt announced his intention to resign the leadership.
We have to delay assessing the effects of a leadership change for several months. Remember the widely discussed ‘Beattie bounce’ which saw the party rise from 12% before Doug Beattie took over the party to 16% three months later, only to fade away over the following nine months to hit 11% in the last Assembly election?
Equally we should not assume that history will repeat itself. We shall just have to wait and see.
The new leader appears to want to move his party’s image closer to that of the other unionist parties. Whether that will be good for the party remains to be seen. It is clearly the right strategy for Burrows personally, who will need a substantial increase in TUV and DUP second preferences to get him over the line in North Antrim. And if he can nick some of their first preferences there, so much the better.
The Sinn Féin result provides no excitement – no change. But it should be deeply disturbing to the party. Their fall from the heady hights of the last Council elections is once again confirmed, and they could easily lose up to two dozen Councillors on 25%. On the other hand, they have so much padding in their vote totals in individual Assembly constituencies that it is conceivable that they could avoid any actual losses there. Conceivable but far from guaranteed.. Moreover, for three decades they have benefited from the notion amongst a portion of their supporters that there is an inevitability about their trajectory in Northern Ireland based on demographics. This is a powerful motivator for activists and voters and one it would be harder to sustain should they lose one in five of their voters.
They too will need to do some creative thinking if they are to turn this round, but it is hard to imagine what they can do proactively rather than hoping that a DUP revival will do the job for them.
SDLP supporters will give two cheers that their slow decline increasingly appears to have been halted. The third cheer will die on their lips as they realise that hopes that they would show further growth have not yet been realised. Nevertheless, it is a quarter of a century since they last had the pleasant prospect of even modest gains in councillors and reasonable confidence that they will not lose Assembly seats provided they can hold onto this 11%. Even an Assembly gain is not out of the question – although they hold a number of seats on such low numbers of first preference votes that many of their extra votes would simply be absorbed in improving the security of the seats they already hold.
It’s “as you were” for Aontú. It depends on how their vote is distributed geographically, but they could make the odd gain at Council level.
A lot of questioning will be going on in Alliance. They need to understand what has seemingly shaved 2 percentage points off their Assembly support. Could it be disillusion from some voters who see little to show for the two years the party has spent in the Executive, the restoration of which was at the core of the party’s last election campaign? Have they lost voters to the Greens, and will those voters still give Alliance their second preference?
If they cannot demonstrate that the Executive can be a vehicle for the kind of improvements their voters want, and if there is no prospect of changing that vehicle where does the party go? Does it take over the role of Opposition, and if so, when? Before the Assembly election? After the Assembly election, if it cannot obtain a satisfactory Programme for Government with the other Executive parties? Or after the Assembly Election having campaigned on the benefits of Opposition? Could it lose voters at the other end who would prefer to see the party fighting its corner within the Executive rather than criticising powerlessly from the Opposition benches?
Personally, I don’t think that changing the leader would solve anything for them. Their problem lies in the Gordian Knot described in the last paragraph.
As with other small parties the key to its prospects lies in the geographical distribution of their voters. Unless they are highly concentrated in a very small number of locations the new votes that recent polls have promised will largely return from whence they came in the form of second preferences. Organisation will be the party’s only route to converting these votes into council, and just maybe Assembly, seats – and that is a very big challenge for small parties with limited resources and manpower. The volunteer base will be even more vital to them than to the bigger parties.
All the points made about the Greens apply equally to PBP. Much excitement was generated in some quarters by the party’s statistically meaningless rise from 1% to 2%, and any despondency about its drop back to one would be equally misplaced. The party have the possibility of retaining their West Belfast seat if they can improve on their 2022 performance, if not they will lose it. A NI wide poll really cannot tell us anything meaningful about that.
For the record the number for smaller parties and Independents remains similar to before. Polls cannot accurately measure the prospects of candidates who have yet to declare.
Also for the record, an update for the designation totals. As usual the final totals for January cannot be calculated until LucidTalk publish their detailed tables sometime in the next few days.
Michael Hehir is a retired sales and marketing manager. He studied in Northern Ireland but now lives between England and Italy.
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