Back to the future (mostly): New LucidTalk poll…

By this time next year the candidates for 90 Assembly and 462 Council seats will have been nominated, posters will be up and the first leaflets on their way. This will be the first time since 2011 when both elections will be held on the same day.

But when you look at the results for this month’s LucidTalk poll in the BelTel you could be forgiven for thinking that you were back in 2021. For most parties the picture today is pretty much the same as it was before the last Assembly election.

Does that mean that we can predict that the results of the next elections will be the same as the last? Certainly not – for while the support levels may look the same today as they did then, the politics are not the same.

There are three crucial differences between the political context then and now which could prove very significant. 1) Before the 2022 election there had never been a nationalist First Minister. 2) The UK had only left the EU just over a year before, and the arrangements for Northern Ireland were still being hotly contested. 3) In 2023 all unionist parties were still boycotting the Assembly over those arrangement. We will return to the impact of these conditions as we examine each party’s poll results.

 

A drop or rise of 1% is meaningless in a poll – it could be no more than a real change of 0.01% moving the rounded figure up or down by 1%. And anyway, it is well within the margin of error of 2.3%.

But what is very meaningful is a consistent pattern. Over the last year the party’s average is back where it was in the year before the last Assembly election, 6% points below its Council election peak. And the latest figure is 7% points below.

Can SF recover from this position? History shows that it has done so before, and one would expect that its highly regarded electoral machine will continue to give it an advantage in identifying and turning out potential supporters. On the other hand, the political context may not be as favourable.

Sinn Féin will be campaigning to keep a nationalist in the First Minister spot. Keeping something as it is may not be quite as exciting and motivating for potential voters as the prospect of an historic first. And perhaps many will believe that an SF First Minister is inevitable anyway – especially if DUP support remains weak.

For years the DUP and SF played up the importance of obtaining the First Minister role. In 2022 many nationalists may have hoped and believed that a big change would make a big difference. Do they all think the difference has been as great as they expected?

In 2027 SF faces the problem of incumbency – playing a leading role in an unloved Executive.

Nevertheless, this does not yet put SF Assembly seats at risk. Most are held by comfortable margins, except West Belfast where boundary changes mean that either SF or People Before Profit are likely to lose one to the DUP.

It is in the local Councils that the party would feel the pain of a reduced vote share. Their 2023 performance exceeded their wildest hopes. We know that because in some areas they did not field as many candidates as their vote would have justified. And in a small handful of places, it is possible to confidently state that an extra candidate would have produced an extra gain. (It is worth noting however that their vote share was in line with polling.)

What makes a 31% SF share even more astonishing is that normally both the SF and DUP voteshares suffer attrition in Council elections from Independents, smaller parties and personal votes for particularly popular candidates from other parties. In 2011, when the Assembly and Council elections were held on the same day, the Sinn Féin vote was 2.2% points lower for their council candidates than their Assembly candidates had achieved. For the DUP the council vote share was 2.8% lower.

Looking at individual Council District Electoral Area results for 2023 one is struck time and again by large increases in nationalist turnout which largely benefited SF. I suspect that this may be because the historic installation of a nationalist first minister was being prevented by the unionist boycott of Stormont over the post-Brexit arrangements. Nationalists felt robbed and wanted to make their displeasure known.

We can clearly see the effects in the following chart, with the total nationalist vote share at a 43.1% high.

In 2027 this particular turnout advantage will disappear with Council turnout and Assembly turnout virtually identical.

If SF were to drop up to a quarter of its council vote share that would inevitably produce heavy losses.

 

The picture isn’t much brighter for the DUP. Over the last year it’s average is 1% point above the year before the last Assembly election, but 7% points lower than before the last Council election.

The party is pinning its hopes on the TUV falling back as severely as it did in the year leading up to the 2022 Assembly election. And it’s progressive improvement from 17% to 19% over the previous three polls certainly gave it some grounds for hope.

Theoretically, given the margin of error, they could be sitting on 20% with the recovery continuing, or just as likely/unlikely on 16%. But, looking at the pattern, it appears far more likely that they have stalled, at least for now.

For them the context of the battle around the FM position is the mirror image of SF’s. The party played up the importance of preventing an SF First Minister, and by implication the power of that role. By 2027 it will be 5 years since the DUP lost the role, and over 3 years since Michelle O’Neill was installed in the post.

For the DUP it was certainly rewarding when they could campaign against the terrors of an SF FM, now they have to campaign against the far more mundane reality.

That’s not to say that unionists would not wish to dethrone Ms O’Neill, but that is when the DUP runs into another change in the political context. The unionist parties are no longer united on the post-Brexit arrangements. In 2022 those unionists who wished to do so could vote both to keep SF out, and to express total opposition to the post-Brexit “sea border”. Both positions were espoused by the DUP, so many who had been toying with the TUV fell back behind the DUP.

This time they have to chose between those two propositions. Will the desire to object to the “sea border”, and punish the DUP for breaking ranks by returning to Stormont (and for failing to hold the FM position?) be outweighed by the desire to take back the FM post? Does taking the FM post still seem as critical as it once did? How likely is it anyway?

As it is, the DUP are still in the zone where they would lose Assembly seats to the DUP.

It should also be noted that even a return to 2022 levels of support would not be sufficient to hold all of their Council seats.

 

Alliance are currently firmly stuck. Depending on the geographical distribution of the rising Green vote, and on transfers, they could face Assembly losses, and would expect to also drop councillors. Because they are subject to potential transfers from three directions, other Others (mainly Greens),nationalist parties and unionist parties, the potential effects are difficult to calculate.

What is certain is that Alliance will be feeling very uncomfortable. Since the previous poll their earlier hints that they may leave the Executive have become more explicit. That decision is one that they would probably prefer not to have to face, since both the potential rewards and the risks are obvious. But if they are to hope to gain anything by it, they will have to decide soon. They would need time make the case that leaving was the right thing to do, and then they would need more time to establish and exploit their new role in opposition.

 

The party will be relieved not to have slipped below January’s 11%. Their big test will come over the next 12 months. Drop further and their hopes of picking up more than one or two Assembly seats, at best, rapidly diminish. My best estimate as things stand is that they need to be at 8% or 9% to have much chance of gaining a seat, but above 10% or 11% they could make a significant dent in DUP numbers.

Their Council results were poor. Their 3.8% only delivered 10 seats. That was reflective of a lack of organisation outside of North Antrim. They failed to field many candidates, even failing to do so in places where their previous year’s Assembly vote would have made seats highly winnable.

To what extent has that changed?

Ben Habib’s new party, Advance UK, has said that it will field candidates in these elections. There is no polling to suggest how they might perform, but even if they win few votes they could pose a risk to TUV prospects if they succeed in poaching activists or potential activists from the TUV.

The party’s polled support is highly stable, placing them exactly where they were in the year before the last Assembly election. For a party which suffered decades of decline that is very welcome and, no doubt, motivating. They can reasonably hope to hold their Assembly numbers, and 11% would produce some modest council gains.

On the other hand, their principal competitor has slipped 2% points over the last year, but the SDLP does not appear to have profited. It also appears that their leader’s polling as the most popular party leader has not translated into voting intentions. Perhaps because she sits at Westminster and the poll measured Assembly voting intentions?

Leveraging Hanna’s popularity would appear to be the biggest challenge facing the SDLP.

 

 

It really depends on how you look at the UUP’s figures whether you think them good or disappointing.

On the good side they have held their 13% figure, placing them 2% points above their last Assembly and Council results. That could mean they are on an upward arc which still has some way to run, or that they have hit a level which puts their current MLA and Council seats in a strong position with the possibility of a few gains at Council level.

On the disappointing side they are still performing below the level they held before the last Assembly elections – which leaves open the possibility that they could once again be squeezed by the DUP seeking to shore up its challenge from the TUV.

Much will depend on their new leader. Jon Burrows has made a strong start, overtaking Jim Allister as the most popular unionist party leader.

How much difference does party leader popularity make? Perhaps it will be worth more to the UUP where Burrows leads up their Assembly team than it appears to have for the SDLP whose leader is in Westminster?

 

These are the people who will be partying this evening. Even if a move of 1% is not significant it will be highly motivational coming after two other such increases. And for a party which must rely more than most on the enthusiasm of its activists that is significant in itself.

At worst they are more strongly placed than they were before the last set of elections. At best they can hope that they will gain further from the attention which will surround their GB counterparts after next month’s English, Scottish and Welsh elections.

Whether that translates into a return to the Assembly depends entirely on the geographical distribution of their new support – but every percentage point makes that more possible.

 

PBP face an uphill struggle to retain their West Belfast Assembly seat. They, too, are sitting where they did in the year before the last election.

They will be pleased that January’s 1% looks like a blip. But they will be even more pleased to see the weak figures for Sinn Féin. For PBP, staying in the Assembly means their performance must be a bit stronger than last time, and SF’s must be weaker. If not, a possible DUP gain would be at their expense.

 

As with the Greens and PBP, geographical distribution of the Aontù vote is everything. It needs to be very clumpy if they are to win anything, an even spread would spell disaster.

If they achieve 3% it is still highly unlikely, but not totally impossible, that they could gain an Assembly seat. What seems more promising is that a handful of council seats could enable them to put down deeper roots.

 

This shows the parties and independents unaccounted for in the previous charts. We will not know how these break down between unionist, nationalist and other until the detailed LucidTalk tables are published.

Since we are also having Council elections it is worth repeating that this poll asked about voting intentions at the Assembly election. It is not possible to estimate support for these parties and Independents from a poll since their support is highly localised. As has been noted above some people split their voting in different types of elections.