Adam Price most most popular leader, but a long way to go.

oProfessor Roger Awan-Scully second trance of the Welsh Political Barometer poll provides us with a fuhrer insight into the standing of the Parties in Wales this time of the Party leaders

Professor Roger Awan-Scully writes

..Among the things covered in the new Barometer poll are public ratings of the main UK and Welsh party leaders – asked using our now customary 0-10 scale. I have written a piece for the New Statesman, summarising what I think are the problematic implications for Welsh Labour of some of these findings.

As I have commented on before, these leader ratings questions generally contain two useful pieces of information. The first is the percentage of respondents who feel unable to give a rating, and simply choose Don’t Know. This is a reasonable approximation for the public visibility of a leader. Here are the percentage of people who listed Don’t Know as their response for each of the party leaders asked about in the latest Barometer poll. (Please note: as well as the main UK and Welsh party leaders, we also included two recent Welsh party leaders, Carwyn Jones and Leanne Wood):

Don't Know

Theresa May: 9%

Jeremy Corbyn: 10%

Vince Cable: 30%

Gerard Batten: 73%

Carwyn Jones: 27%

Mark Drakeford: 56%

Paul Davies: 74%

Leanne Wood: 32%

Adam Price: 72%

Jane Dodds: 76%

Gareth Bennett: 76%

Leanne Wood of course , certainly increased he profile when she was included in among the other Party leaders in the TV debates for the last  number of UK General Elections, The question is would Adam Price match this if he was given the same opportunity?

Professor Roger Awan-Scully writes...

....As has been seen on many previous occasions, there is a stark gap in public awareness of the two main UK party leaders and just about all other figures. But none of the new party leaders in Wales, including the new First Minister, have yet managed to approach the levels of public visibility achieved by Carwyn Jones or Leanne Wood.
Here are the average ratings out of ten for each leader (or ex-leader), among those respondents who felt able to rate each of them – with, in brackets, the change on the last Barometer poll to ask this question, published in early December):

Theresa May: 3.5 (-0.4)

Jeremy Corbyn: 3.2 (-0.7)

Vince Cable: 3.8 (-0.1)

Gerard Batten: 2.8 (-0.3)

Carwyn Jones: 4.5 (unchanged)

Mark Drakeford: 3.9 (-0.1)

Paul Davies: 3.5 (-0.2)

Leanne Wood: 4.5 (+0.1)

Adam Price: 4.6 (+0.3)

Jane Dodds: 4.0 (+0.2)

Gareth Bennett: 3.1 (+0.1)

As has so often been the case in the past, the overall message here is probably one of the unpopularity of politicians – none of them can even manage a ratings of five out of ten. But it is also striking to see the decline in evaluations of the main UK party leaders. The Prime Minister’s ratings have fallen again, and are now at a very low level. Yet astonishingly – and in Wales, Labour’s ultimate electoral bastion – Jeremy Corbyn has fallen substantially further in public esteem and is now polling even worse than Theresa May. Indeed, Corbyn’s average rating with the Welsh public is now barely above that of UKIP’s Welsh Assembly leader, Gareth Bennett.Among the Welsh-level politicians, it is notable that Mark Drakeford continues to poll quite poorly among those willing to offer a view on him. This continues something noted during the Welsh labour leadership contest: although the new First Minister was clearly rated highly by many of his colleagues, he has not yet been able to make the same impression on the Welsh public. There is some encouraging new for Plaid Cymru. Although most of the Welsh public do net yet appear to know who Adam Price is, among those who are aware of him his ratings have risen – indeed, he is (very marginally) the most highly-rated of all the politicians questioned about in the latest poll. The clear challenge for Mr Price, and his party, will be for him to cut through to a much larger proportion of the Welsh electorate.

 Of course the fact that  no leader has reached higher than 5 (50%) could be an indication of the general mistrust amongst the Welsh Electorate .

However it does appear comparing Adam Price to the other Welsh leaders it seems that when he does register with voters he has  had an impact.

Because of the  lamentable amount of political coverage of Welsh Politics , it may ironically take a UK election for Adam Price to register with more of the public and in doing so receive a positive reaction.

Indeed I could well see a scenario after a leaders debate for the next UK elections (if the rest are still in place), voters in England asking why they have the choice of Corbyn, May , or Cable as leaders and Wales and Scotland  in Price and Sturgeon seem to be streets ahead.