Matthew Price

Somebody ctrl+f that one guy’s name when the files are released.

'Bread, circuses, and polling errors: Are we truly measuring what matters?' - LabourList Pollsters who ask questions that add nuance are rewarded with a richer look at the public’s outlook argues Labour Together's Calum Weir.

As immigration dominates the brief this morning, here’s my two cents on the salience vs. the importance of the issue:

labourlist.org/2025/11/immi...

(Full report linked below - Many thanks to @emmaburnell.bsky.social!!)

Excellent festive gift inspiration.

Great piece.

It was fascinating to work on this research with @hopenothate.org.uk.

All political parties are coalitions of voters with different preferences, but current supporters of Reform are especially disparate. The big question is how long Farage can keep them all on side.

Performance Tracker 2025: Schools | Institute for Government It will be extremely difficult for the government to meet its education priorities within the budget it has set for the coming parliament.

NEW REPORT Labour is struggling to meet its education priorities. It has big ambitions to improve schools, but a budget that falls short of matching them. And with no clear plans to reform the SEND system or tackle workforce shortages, children are being left without the support they need.

ANES Data Release! electionstudies.org/data-center/...

The 3-wave ANES panel is now available. It merges data from 3 election studies (2016-2020-2024), the first time the ANES has collected interviews of the same respondents across 3 presidential elections.

A quarter of 18-34 y/o men spoiled their vote in the Irish presidential election, per @kevcunningham.bsky.social

Now that’s an age curve.

Chris continues to perform a public service by sharing new boundary notional results (and credit also to the BBC for paying for them and allowing them to be public).

Hey! Pollster working in Britain here (not a British pollster!) - the BPC regulations have a really positive effect on industry norms here, and reflect/contribute to a completely different environment from the US.

Please release the results before and after the announcement. Perfect chance to estimate the benefit to Humphreys!

Exclusive poll: how Labour can win on immigration A new opinion survey finds that people see immigration as a problem for Britain, but when it comes to their own lives, they have other priorities

Important bit of new polling from @deltapoll.bsky.social: ask people for the top issue facing the country and immigration is second, at 49%.

But ask what’s most important for *them* and it drops to fourth, at just 21%.

That gap might suggest a way out of Labour’s mess…

While it’s true that Labour has become unduly obsessed with the threat from Reform while it loses voters to its left, it’s also true that there are far more Lab-Reform marginals than Lab-Lib or Lab-Green ones. And in those seats, votes lost to Reform count double.

Inside The Founding Of Jeremy Corbyn's New Party: 'End This Horrible Power Struggle' The trials and tribulations of founding a new party on the left. Can they unite? What challenges lie ahead? Sienna Rodgers reports

From this brilliant profile of Your Party by @siennarodgers.bsky.social

Private meetings in the autumn of 2024 engendered further divisions: attendees spent their time “furiously agreeing with each other” on the basic politics, in the words of one, while disagreeing with the way gatherings were organised.

Painfully recognisable to anyone who has ever been involved in left-wing politics.

Really nice work!

I would for sure read the 3000-word blog post version of this

Who voted for Zohran Mamdani? Zohram Mamdani’s triumph over Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic primary signals a shift towards the progressive wing of the party. Mamdani excelled among younger, Hispanic, and Asi…

This from @owenwntr.bsky.social is excellent.

There’s a limit to how much you can learn from precinct-level data, but this piece goes right up to that limit.

We were lucky enough to have our YouGov/The Economist poll in field when the US bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. You can see the partisan realignment in real time

This in turn reflects what many reported as a reluctance, at senior levels, to hear and act on difficult news. The organisation had established values to be radical, ambitious, inclusive, sustainable. And the experience during the pandemic well illustrates how such values can drive extraordinary behaviour and results. Unfortunately, the lesson learned seems to have been “all things are possible”, without the nuance that this is typically only true when there is an overwhelming emergency, which understandably de-prioritises many other activities. Several people suggested that the list of values was missing “realistic”.

Telling paragraph on culture at the ONS from the Devereux Review.

Right now on political prediction markets you can place bets on Newsom, AOC, Buttigieg, Shapiro, and Harris to be the Dem nominee in 28 and more than double your stake if it ends up being any of them.

Good deal?

Polls often get criticized unfairly. But in #NYCmayor, they had an unambiguously bad night. Mamdani averaged 28.5% of 1st-place votes in the last 4 independent polls of the race. He currently has 43.5%.

People usually assume that when a popular politician adopts an unpopular policy, the politician will become less popular. But it’s just as likely that the policy becomes more popular instead.

Confusion contagion?

Curse those Indian, Chinese, Italian (etc.) immigrants, coming over here and ruining the indigenous food culture.

Brilliant piece, Ben.

It may be because I’m not white British, but I actually can’t think of any other way to pronounce “yookay”… am I missing something?

Thanks, Stephen! So far I recommend Bordeaux

I wish

Congrats, Adam!