Plaid supporters may well feel pleased that the party has seemingly been vindicated by public opinion over the decision to nominate Leanne Wood for First Minister/
This week saw publication of the first Welsh Political Barometer poll to be conducted since the National Assembly election last month.
The Polls which you can see here see very little change in voting intentions though Plaid seem the only Party to get a increase in support.
As Roger Scully the Doyen of the number crunching puts it
"Clearly we see Labour holding steady and still some way in the lead. But the big news would appear to be Plaid Cymru’s rating – up five points on the immediate pre-election poll. Some of this may be accounted for by that poll having produced a somewhat Plaid-unfriendly sample. But even so, our new poll has Plaid up 2.5 points on their election result. In short, there is absolutely nothing here to indicate that Plaid Cymru were damaged politically by the arguments following the stand-off over the First Minister vote in the Assembly. Elsewhere we see the Conservatives’ support ebbing, while that for UKIP remains robust".Indeed the Polsters put the question directly to those sampled.
“Thinking about the recent debate surrounding the appointment of First Minister and formation of the Welsh government, following the Welsh Assembly elections, which, if any, of the following parties do you think improved its reputation the most?”“And which, if any, of the following parties do you think damaged its reputation the most?”
The table below shows answers to both questions from the respondents:
| Party | Improved | Damaged |
| Labour | 12% | 19% |
| Plaid | 19% | 11% |
| Conservative | 4% | 14% |
| UKIP | 7% | 11% |
| Lib-Dems | 4% | 6% |
| None of them | 32% | 10% |
| Don’t Know | 22% | 28% |
"This table is, I think, a salutary reminder of how issues that excite close observers of events in Cardiff Bay can fail almost totally to cut through to many people – even when, as in the case of the First Minister vote, those issue are picked up by the UK-wide media. Large numbers of our respondents simply chose the ‘None of them’ or ‘Don’t Know’ options for both questions".
However there is a difference between ‘None of them’ or ‘Don’t Know’ the former does not mean disinterest but a feeling that many felt no one party emerged positively or negatively out of this
But as Professor Sculley points out
"But the findings also show us how the views of political commentators are far from an infallible guide to the thought processes of ordinary people. To the extent that people made anything at all of the shenanigans in the Bay, our survey indicates that Plaid emerged as the most positively evaluated party, and Labour as the most damaged. That is not what most commentary would have led anyone to expect".Maybe it shows the extent that Labour link with the Welsh Media is to powerful and there is to much of trend to simply repeat Labour Press releases as the actual news and not as only one of the Welsh Parties would wish we believed it is.
1 comment:
Perhaps Wales is entering a new age of politics after all because the poll findings certainly didn’t go to usual script of Labour good, Plaid Cymru bad.
As you said the FM nomination badly exposed parts of the Welsh media and commentators with BBC Wales and Trinity Mirror happily pumping out Labour propaganda, yet voters mostly saw through it and perhaps the latest poll will put to bed the other myth that what happens on social media has little affect on the general voting public because if you judged the affair by Facebook/Twitter you’d have thought Labour had ‘won’ the argument there as well.
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