Owen Winter
Political data journalist at The Economist
- Estimating pollster house effects for a Hungarian poll tracker. Quite revealing!
- The Hungarian Socialist Party might not run in 2026, for the first time since democratisation hvg.hu/itthon/20260... The party was in power for 12 of the first 20 years of post-communist Hungarian democracy
- MSZP-ification
- For UK comparison: Liverpool 40% Manchester 39% Nottingham 38% Brighton/Hove 37% Newcastle 37% Hull 35% Cambridge 34%
- Leaving aside the outliers, it does seem like the Greens levelled off in polling remarkably quickly after Polanski became leader. Jumped from 9% to 13% on average in a few weeks and have been stuck there(ish) since November. Makes Gorton and Denton very important for them
- e.g. just looking at the four pollsters who have published in each of the past 10 months (to keep composition constant)
- Australia's immigration rate, relative to its size, has been much higher than Britain's in recent years. The country is 32% foreign-born compared with 16% in Britain (one of the highest foreign-born populations in the western world). In some ways it's surprising the backlash didn't come sooner
- Of course in practice the relationship between immigration and hard-right parties is not that simple. In Europe they are negatively correlated! www.economist.com/graphic-deta...
- A possibility we wrote up here: www.economist.com/united-state...
- Some chatter about Greens picking a Muslim candidate but I think Spencer is probably a decent fit for the constituency in other ways. She’s a plumber who works in the area and won 7% in the 2024 mayoral election (which is good considering Burnham was on the ballot)
- Not the star appeal of Polanski but probably low risk
- According to the polls, London is the only region which would vote for Labour, if an election were held today. But that conceals the party's weakness in a city it can't afford to lose: www.economist.com/britain/2026...
- The actual number of respondents giving a voting intention here was *51 people*. So you can treat this as something like: Reform 24% - 50% Labour 21% - 47% Green 12% - 34%
- Also worth pointing out that 22% of Labour and 10% of Green 2024 voters answered "don't know" this time, compared with 0% for both Reform and the Conservatives
