The university of Liverpool had conducted a new poll. I did not cover their previous poll which was conducted just a few months after the Assembly election in 2022 due to obscure results in the data breakdown, for example it suggested that the vast majority of TUV voters would back a United Ireland. That led me to approach the poll with more caution than usual.
With polling the most important thing is to look at trends and while there are some surprising results in this poll, the trends are familiar with what we have seen since May 2022.
The headline poll results are below. Note that every change is within the margin of error!
The ‘par score for seats’ tells us what each party would win in PR worked perfectly. The predicted seats column considers other factors such as the nature of each constituency.
My seat change predictions would see;
SF gaining a seat in South Down from the SDLP,
The DUP gaining seats in North Antrim and Strangford from Alliance,
Alliance gaining a seat in East Londonderry from the SDLP,
People Before Profit gaining a seat in Foyle from the SDLP.
These are just the predictions that make sense to me based on this poll, Alliance could hold all of their seats and the SDLP could be reduced to just 4 seats!
This is another brutal poll for the SDLP. It is easy to write off one poll as an outlier but every poll we have seen since May 2022 has shown the SDLP in decline. The party lost its deputy leader in the last election and if the current polling trends were borne out in an Assembly election then it risks losing several high profile party representatives. The DUP got replaced their leader when polling was unfavourable, you could say they acted too quickly but I am surprised that we have not heard any talk about a leadership challenge within the SDLP.
Sinn Féin may find this poll frustrating as they may only gain a single seat, I suspect they would still believe they would gain as many as 3 however with East Londonderry and Upper Bann remaining key targets.
The DUP will be content that they are winning back support from the TUV. Those vote gains could well result in no seat gains, but a strengthened and more unified unionist vote could deliver gains in North Antrim and Strangford.
This poll was asking about voting in an Assembly election, we should be cautious about assuming party support will be similar for the upcoming council elections. The larger parties may see their vote fall a few percentage points as smaller parties and independents tend to poll well in local elections.
Below is a tracker of polls since the 2022 Assembly election. Trends are more important than one poll so here we can track what voters are thinking over a longer term.
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