Within four minutes of the end of last night’s TV debate between the party leaders, YouGov “called” Nick Clegg as the winner. Four minutes later we produced weighted data on the responses of more than 1,000 viewers – the fastest representative survey ever conducted in Britain.
Bragging over: what did our post-debate poll for the Sun tell us? The most obvious is that Clegg’s margin of victory was immense. 51% said he ‘performed best overall’, compared with 29% for David Cameron and just 19% for Gordon Brown.
The impact of this victory becomes clear from another question. We asked viewers who they thought would make the best Prime Minister – having posed this question to the same people before the debate. Beforehand, 43% named Cameron, 31% named Brown and 14% named Clegg; 11% were don’t knows. Immediately after the debate, Clegg’s score had almost doubled to 26%; with Cameron’s score down 4 to 39%, Brown’s down 2 to 29% and don’t knows down five to 6%.
It wasn’t that viewers were actively repelled by Brown or Cameron: from another set of before-and-after results, we find that the proportion of viewers who had ‘a lot’ or ‘some’ confidence in the party leaders ‘to take the right decisions for the future of Britain’ rose for all three men. Brown’s confidence rating rose from 42 to 47%, while Cameron’s rose from 50 to 54%. But while those two leaders edged forward, Clegg enjoyed a dramatic surge, from 45% before the debate to an astonishing 74% afterwards.
How come? One reason is that he won admirers across the political spectrum, while Brown and Cameron picked up few new friends from each other’s tribe
. Here are the confidence ratings of the three leaders by Tory and Labour supporters (according to voting intentions before the debate):
Brown: Labour supporters 97%, Conservative supporters 10%
Cameron: Labour supporters 13%, Conservative supporters 96%
Clegg: Labour supporters 70%, Conservative supporters 64%
As it happens, Lib Dem supporters had far more post-debate confidence in Brown (60%) than Cameron (26%). But that can only fractionally soften the blow from the fact that the Prime Minister was perceived to have performed worst in the debate.
Looking ahead, the big unknown is how Clegg’s triumph will affect votes on May 6. Some caution is in order. Most voters did not watch the debate; the two remaining debates may produce different outcome; and admiration for a 90-minute performance does not automatically translate into a huge shift in votes.
That said, if Clegg continues to perform well, it is likely that Lib Dem support will rise – perhaps dramatically in the polls over the next two or three days before slipping back to some extent; but retaining enough of the immediate extra vote to secure some extra votes on election day.
The most predictable consequence of this is that the Lib Dems will hold more of their marginal seats than they would have done. This will worry the Tories who will find it harder to win the general election outright if they can’t capture at least ten Lib Dem seats.
But the bigger impact of any Lib Dem advance will be on Labour-Conservative marginals. If the Lib Dems take more votes from Labour than the Tories, then the Tories will gain more seats from Labour. In that event, Clegg’s debate triumph will prove to be far better news for Cameron than Brown – and, given the large number of Lab-Con marginals – better for Cameron than for Clegg himself.
On then other hand, if the Lib Dems take more votes from the Tories than from Labour, then the Tories take win fewer seats from Labour, and struggle to secure an overall majority.
YouGov’s daily polls will follow this drama until election day and measure the day-by-day impact of a campaign that has suddenly become more open.
Technical note: some days before last night’s debate, YouGov conducted a large-scale survey to find out who would watch it. This provided not only our pool of viewers for the post-debate survey; it also enabled us to profile the audience. Viewers were significantly more likely than the electorate as a whole to be over 55, to be men, and to read upmarket newspapers. They were also slightly more likely to be Conservative. Had we weighted the data to the political views of the electorate, rather to that of viewers of this programme, Brown’s figures would have been fractionally higher and Cameron’s fractionally lower. But these adjustments would have made no difference to the overall conclusions to be drawn from the survey.
