In DUP we trust (or not)…

“Do you believe the DUP is being fully honest about what it knew in relation to Jeffrey Donaldson’s double life?”

That is the question voters were asked by LucidTalk in their latest poll for the Belfast Telegraph.

The BT is holding over the results on voting intentions for another day or two. There can be little doubt that, after reading today’s responses, the DUP leadership’s anxiety levels will be twisted up another few notches as they are forced to wait.

Amongst those respondents who, as the paper phrased it, “say they will still vote” for the DUP the results were:

Yes – Fully truthful: 57%

No – Only partially truthful: 24%

No – Completely untruthful: 14%

Don’t know: 5%

I suppose the party can take some comfort, in that the majority of its voters believe it has been fully truthful. And in this context a Don’t Know response is almost as good – since it is likely to include those who intend to give the party the benefit of the doubt or who still feel such loyalty to the party that they do not wish to criticise it. Together that would represent nearly two thirds of their voters.

Of course, what we don’t yet know is how many still remain their voters. But, again looking on the positive for the party, there does seem to be a solid core they can count on.

Obviously, the fact that a quarter of their voters judge the party to be only partly truthful, represents a weakness which the TUV and UUP can seek to exploit. But that has to be set against the fact that a significant proportion of voters are already cynical towards politicians and parties, even those that they support. That appears to be especially true of the larger parties. In answer to a separate question on trust in their own party the DUP score was 64%, but Sinn Féin supporters only rated their party 73% and Alliance voters gave theirs 70%. Frankly, given the smaller sample sizes for individual parties meaning that the margin of error is higher, all three scores might as well be thought of as much the same.

The most worrying figure for the DUP is that 14% of their voters said their party was completely untruthful. Those voters are ripe for the picking if either the TUV or UUP chose the correct pitch.

Currently Jim Allister is going with a conspiracy theory that Donaldson was blackmailed into taking his party back into Stormont on the back of the Windsor Agreement. Jon Burrows is going with the more visceral lock-him-up-and-throw-away-the-key approach.

It’s a classic case of the appeal to the mind versus the appeal to the gut. Which will prove more effective?

Although the TUV has in recent years proved itself more capable of attracting voters away from the DUP, when it comes to transfers DUP voters are more likely to opt for the UUP. For every 2 DUP voters who transferred to the TUV, 3 went for the UUP in the last Assembly and Council elections. This may give the UUP an advantage in the competition for disillusioned DUP voters on this occasion.

We won’t have long now to wait for the first post-Donaldson poll.