Voter survey shows Miliband panic is overblown

There is a wobble going on in the Labour party over Ed Miliband’s leadership. A number of Labour backbenchers are said to be becoming increasingly nervous about retaining their seats in next year’s general election. This has largely come about because of unfavourable comparisons in the polls between the prime minister and the Labour leader.

But – as often is the case when it comes to measuring public opinion – the question asked plays a key role in influencing the answers. Our monthly surveys of the electorate conducted at the University of Essex show that in September of this year, 33% of respondents thought David Cameron is the best prime minister and only 19% thought this about Miliband.

Asking who is the best leader is a standard question used by a lot of pollsters to compare the party leaders. However, it is far from an ideal question because it tends to be biased towards the incumbent, regardless of whether they are Labour or Conservatives. The answers, therefore, can give a misleading picture of what people really think.

There is an alternative question which is much better. If you ask voters to provide a score out of ten on a likeability scale, where zero means that a respondent really dislikes a leader and ten means that they really like them, you get quite different results.

It turns out that likeability is closely associated with other desirable traits that a successful leader needs, such as being seen as competent, decisive, in touch with ordinary people and honest. More to the point, it is a powerful predictor of voting intentions and therefore a good guide to what people might do in the general election.

We’ve charted the likeability scores for the three major party leaders since June 2010 – the month after the general election – through to September 2014. It turns out that in September, the Labour leader had an average score of 3.9 compared with 4.2 for Cameron and 3.3 for Nick Clegg. So none of them are particularly popular.

The surveys do show that Cameron is indeed more popular than Ed Miliband and a lot more popular than his deputy, Clegg. But on this scale the prime minister is only 0.3 points ahead of the Labour leader, which is relatively small gap. In judging these scores it is important to remember that Miliband will be judged against Cameron and Clegg in the general election, not some ideal leader with a perfect score. It is the difference between leaders which counts, not the absolute scores on the scale.

The findings suggest Miliband’s unpopularity has been exaggerated in comparison with Cameron and clearly some Labour backbenchers are getting very anxious about what are relatively small differences, given that political leaders in general are none too popular.

http://www.essex.ac.uk/news/event.aspx?e_id=7063

When it comes to 'likeability' Miliband isn't that far short of Cameron and apparently  'likeability is an important predictor of voting intentions.

Well there we go then!

As weird as this seems to me, I have to think it's better than the situation we have in the U.S., where a lot of people have seemed to think "if Obama wins, okay -- problem solved."

These leaders need a party with the power to support them. In the end, it doesn't really matter who gets to occupy the glamorous position, what really matters is whether they have the allies in government to get anything done.

Which is to say, I think that an Obama era in which Democrats had full control of the U.S. government apparatus would have looked a lot different from the Obama era we've actually had. Republicans will say that Obama had both houses of Congress for a long time, but he really only had it a very short time -- because of Republican shenanigans, as we saw with Senator Franken's seat.

Obama is the type of person who believes something is better than nothing -- a great attitude, I should say -- but because he's had to deal with Republicans, a lot of his agenda has been abandoned due to political necessity.