Last month, 62 per cent of respondents said that they expected David Cameron to be Prime Minister after the next election. (That figure is obtained by adding together the 24 per cent who expected a Conservative majority, the 18 per cent who expected a second Coalition and the 20 per cent who expected a Conservative minority government.)
This month, that headline figure has fallen to 55 per cent. (That’s obtained by adding together the 20 per cent who now expect a Conservative majority, the 16 per cent who expect a second Coalition and the 19 per cent who expect a Conservative minority government.)
In September, the headline finding of this section of the survey was that over two-thirds of Party members expected Cameron to be Prime Minister after the election. Ed Miliband was having a dire summer, and Cameron’s rating in this section thus reached its highest point this year.
Since then, we have had the Party Conference season, Miliband’s attack on the utility companies, two months or so of him being widely seen as setting the political agenda…and Labour’s poll lead, in broad terms, opening up again. In my view, this largely explains our survey result.
Here are the rest of the findings:
In short, Party members have made up their minds for the moment about all our regular poll questions – except that which asks about our chances at the next election.
Over 700 of them responded to the survey. Their replies are checked against those received from our control panel, which was put together by YouGov.