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Irish Examiner Poll
Read more about: Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Green Party, Irish Election, Labour Party, Polls, Progressive Democrats 
The results of the Examiner’s poll are out. Lots of interesting bits to get you going. Party support is here. The news is great for the government. The PDs have a huge 6% compared to the 2%-3% in the RedC polls. That should be sufficient to energise the first months of McDowell’s leadership and galvanise the party further. Fianna Fail too have good news, though fail to break 40% yet again in a poll. Fine Gael and Labour could have done without this poll. The Big-Mo is not present in this poll with FG at 24% following the heady heights of the Red C polls in previous months. Labour too could leave this well alone. But this poll is interesting on a number of more intricate levels. Labour particularly have seen a few stories and blog posts suggest that grassroots is getting stroppy over the closeness with Fine Gael. Reports on the ground of members who question what the party is fighting for and whether they are doing the running for Fine Gael (we shall see).
McDowell’s leadership is unsurprisingsly divisive 40% ok with it 30% against it. Though that says little about converting his popularity among some into votes (an entirely different process to being “tough” and “unique”).
The resignation of Harney seems ex ante facto to be justified by abysmal confidence in her ability to impact health (67%). Though good results between here and May could impact in an altogether different manner.
Small parties seems to have had problems with this Poll. The Greens aren’t much off their Red C numbers but 6% is still a loss of momentum which was surely building behind them. While Sinn Fein has again fallen below 10% to 9%. All this time the PDs are at 6%: double their average under Red C. Polls are fickle things.
Fianna Fail will hope to be lifted bypositive sentiment toward their government (since the PDs are supposed to deal with the bad news). Positive sentiment is 45% with negative sentiment down to 28% from 42%.
The opposition didn’t fare badly in sentiment terms, but there is some way to go yet.
It’s a mug’s game though and anyone could do it.
Point of note for myself is the manner in which Labour’s vote can drift while positive vibes are being shown to the alternative. I was never mad about the pact, but it seems that Labour are not receiving much of a dividend from the partnership with FG while FG are using Labour to reenforce their position as possible party of government. Rudderless supporters may be a way of describing it.
Taking a single poll for small parties is meaningless, you are dealing with the opinion of less than 50 people here, the margin of error his huge. In particular you must be cautious when the poll says something that contradicts a series of previous polls. The only meaning can be gained from a series of polls, which increases the sample base and reduces the margin of error.
The one small-party trend that is visible (apart from slow but steady growth of the Greens) is that Sinn Féin are going nowhere fast, and rather than making a huge breakthrough, they could even be looking at losing seats, particularly in Dublin where they are at five per cent.
The figure of nine percent doesn’t tell the whole story, because they are going down in some areas and up (though not as much) in others. This is bad news because parties ‘get used to’ a particular level of support, and learn how to maximise seats with that level of vote.
When a radical shift comes (up or down) parties tend not to achieve the same conversion rates. In 92 Labour failed to get seats they should have won – two quotas but only one candidate in Dublin South. In 2002 FG in Dún Laoghaire had one quota, three candidates and no seats.
Because of this, SF could lose DSC and DSW with their declining Dublin vote, and fail to make many gains in the west, although at least one seat in Donegal should be a dead cert. Many of SF’s ah targets are in Dublin, and this strategy must now be seriously in question.
On this basis, the SF vote could go from 6.5 per cent in 2002 to todays figure of 9 per cent, yet leave them standing still in number of seats, clearly a very poor result, given the 2005 high in the polls of 13 per cent.
The unstoppable march has stopped.
EXCELLENT NEWS.