New Sunday Business Post Tracker Poll - Government Support Steady

Rough details here, more as it comes out. Its mostly as you were, FF unchanged, Greens at 7%, FG unchanged while Labour loses 1%.

I suppose that it will come as a bit of a surprise to both sides as both Labour and Fine Gael could not have been happier with 1)their start to the Dail term and 2) the government’s misfortunes in the run up to this poll. Yet the government have held support, perhaps a reflection of a number of post-election symptoms in the electorate.

The first is the tendency to give them a chance after winning an election to settle in and get some work done, its only been a brief time yet and electorates don’t like to feel they have made the wrong choice for quite some time (possibly as much as two years). Secondly there is a sense that the way they voted in May has not been undone, the decision still stands and so a splintering of the floating voters etc may take more time although this week presented ample option for voters to peel off the wagon.

However for government this will likely boost confidence. It will be a tough political winter as the HSE, Aer Lingus and other issues look likely to rumble on while in the midst of it all Brian Cowen will begin the two year belt-tightening that is becoming the norm for post-election FF governments now.

The Greens will be thrilled that so far the government experiement is not losing support. They have five years to gain percentage points but can lose so much in a short space of time if it doesn’t play right. This is probably a reflection of their failure to drop any major clangers.

Fine Gael will be a little saddened their new front bench and quite competent opposition thus far has not gone rewarded but there is a full five years in potential (though possibly a little shorter to avoid a census overlap) and some decent time for them to come good. Again no drop is probably reward in itself thus far.

Labour will be disappointed that a new leader and his decent exposure has failed to chime. They will seek time to get things right behind the scene but for Gilmore to halt a slide that has been in the making for 5-10 years will require a feat of organisational and intellectual rigour and skill. He may well have those skills and over the coming years will need to use every last one of them to avoid two implosions in 2009 and 2012. Not because of one drop of 1% but because this drop chimes with trends seen over a long period of time. This is possibly the first signal  to Gilmore that more needs to change than personality for the trend to turn.