With two-and-a-half weeks to go, I’m going to start posting poll aggregates ahead of the June 8 British general election with a regularity yet to be determined. There’s no clever business going on here in terms of weighting and bias adjustment – the results are simply what SAS/STAT’s LOESS function spits out when I plug in all the polling since the 2015 election as harvested from UK Polling Report, using the optimal smoothing parameters it determines through means beyond my pay grade.
The story of the campaign period specifically is that voters have been returning to the major parties, with UKIP suffering particularly badly, to the extent that they are back to looking as “minor” as the Greens. The Liberal Democrats are by no means exempt, despite seemingly having a monopoly on the pro-Europe market. The first of the charts below covers the full course of the current term, while the second zooms in on the period going back to the start of March. Apparent on the second chart but not the first is that the Conservatives have not maintained their early campaign momentum, whereas Labour is undergoing an impressive recovery, albeit from an abysmally low base.
The SNP only got half the Scottish vote in 2015 and has fallen in the poll since then. The GB-wide parties are gaining ground.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2015_(Scotland)
http://whatscotlandthinks.org/questions/how-would-you-be-likely-to-vote-in-a-uk-general-election#line
New thread.