Opinion polling for the 2015 United Kingdom general election
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In the run up to the general election on 7 May 2015, various organisations carried out
opinion polling An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a survey or a poll (although strictly a poll is an actual election) is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions ...
to gauge voting intention. Results of such polls are displayed in this article. Most of the polling companies listed are members of the
British Polling Council The British Polling Council (BPC) is an association of market research companies whose opinion polls are regularly published or broadcast in media in the United Kingdom. The BPC was established in 2004, twelve years after the perceived failure ...
(BPC) and abide by its disclosure rules. The date range for these opinion polls is from 6 May 2010 (the date of the previous general election) to 7 May 2015. Most opinion polls cover only
Great Britain Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the largest European island and the ninth-largest island in the world. It is ...
(
England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
,
Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...
and
Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the Wales–England border, east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the ...
). Separate polls covering constituent countries of the UK and English regions are reported further below while polling of individual constituencies and groups of them (such as groups of marginals) is covered in a separate article. In the event, the actual results proved to be rather different from those indicated by the opinion polls. Opinion polls conducted in the last few months of the campaign, and even in the last few days, had indicated a very close result between the Conservatives and Labour in terms of numbers of votes, suggesting that one of the main parties would have to form a perhaps complex coalition with smaller parties in order to govern. However the actual results showed a stronger performance by the Conservatives, which gave them an overall majority, since Labour also had a weaker performance than the polls had suggested. When the exit poll was initially presented, some commentators and politicians doubted it, with
Paddy Ashdown Jeremy John Durham Ashdown, Baron Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, (27 February 194122 December 2018), better known as Paddy Ashdown, was a British politician and diplomat who served as Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 1988 to 1999. Internati ...
even declaring "If this poll is correct I will publicly eat my hat on your programme" in response to the apparently poor results for the Liberal Democrats. The exit poll was eventually proved to have in fact ''overestimated'' the Liberal Democrats' performance. If the Survation telephone poll (6 May) had been published it would have produced results within 1% of the election results.


Graphical summary

The chart shows the relative state of the parties from 13 May 2010 to 7 May 2015, with each line's colour corresponding to a political party: red for the Labour Party, blue for the
Conservative Party The Conservative Party is a name used by many political parties around the world. These political parties are generally right-wing though their exact ideologies can range from center-right to far-right. Political parties called The Conservative P ...
, purple for the
UK Independence Party The UK Independence Party (UKIP; ) is a Eurosceptic, right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. The party reached its greatest level of success in the mid-2010s, when it gained two members of Parliament and was the largest par ...
, yellow for the Liberal Democrats, and green for the combined
Green Party of England and Wales The Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW; cy, Plaid Werdd Cymru a Lloegr, kw, Party Gwer Pow an Sowson ha Kembra, often simply the Green Party or Greens) is a green, left-wing political party in England and Wales. Since October 2021, Carla ...
and
Scottish Green Party The Scottish Greens (also known as the Scottish Green Party; gd, Pàrtaidh Uaine na h-Alba ; sco, Scots Green Pairtie) are a green political party in Scotland. The party has seven MSPs in the Scottish Parliament as of May 2021. As of the 20 ...
. While not shown here, other parties have on occasion polled higher than one or more of the parties represented, for example in the Lord Ashcroft poll conducted on 17–19 April 2015, where the
Scottish National Party The Scottish National Party (SNP; sco, Scots National Pairty, gd, Pàrtaidh Nàiseanta na h-Alba ) is a Scottish nationalist and social democratic political party in Scotland. The SNP supports and campaigns for Scottish independence from ...
polled 6% and the Greens 4%. Each dot represents a party's results from an opinion poll displayed in the table below.


Poll results

Poll results are listed in the table below in reverse chronological order. The highest percentage figure in each polling survey is displayed in bold, and the background shaded in the leading party's colour. The 'party lead' column shows the percentage-point difference between the two parties with the highest figures. In the instance of a tie, no figure is shaded but both are displayed in bold. Throughout the 2010-2015 parliament, first and second places have without exception alternated between the Conservatives and Labour. The Liberal Democrats and the UK Independence Party have tended to hold either third or fourth place in each individual poll. The combined Green parties of
England and Wales England and Wales () is one of the three legal jurisdictions of the United Kingdom. It covers the constituent countries England and Wales and was formed by the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542. The substantive law of the jurisdiction is Eng ...
and
Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...
have most frequently polled fifth and have on occasions polled fourth – level with or ahead of the
UK Independence Party The UK Independence Party (UKIP; ) is a Eurosceptic, right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. The party reached its greatest level of success in the mid-2010s, when it gained two members of Parliament and was the largest par ...
or the Liberal Democrats. Included in the 'others' column are other smaller parties, the largest of which (by votes at the 2010 general election) are the
British National Party The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right, fascist political party in the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in Wigton, Cumbria, and its leader is Adam Walker. A minor party, it has no elected representatives at any level of UK gover ...
, the
Scottish National Party The Scottish National Party (SNP; sco, Scots National Pairty, gd, Pàrtaidh Nàiseanta na h-Alba ) is a Scottish nationalist and social democratic political party in Scotland. The SNP supports and campaigns for Scottish independence from ...
and
Plaid Cymru Plaid Cymru ( ; ; officially Plaid Cymru – the Party of Wales, often referred to simply as Plaid) is a centre-left to left-wing, Welsh nationalist political party in Wales, committed to Welsh independence from the United Kingdom. Plaid wa ...
. Detailed poll results that break down 'others' for some dates in 2014 and 2010 are available in a second table, below.


2015


2014


2013


2012


2011


2010

''Note: some polls in 2010 did not give an individual figure for the UK Independence Party or the Greens. In these cases, the percentage intending to vote Green and/or UKIP is included with the 'others'.''


Sub-national polling

Polling was conducted separately in the constituent countries of the United Kingdom. Of the 650 seats in the
House of Commons The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. ...
, England had 533, Scotland had 59, Wales had 40 and Northern Ireland had 18.


Leadership approval polling


Methodology

Each polling organisation uses slightly different methodology in their collection of data; a brief description of each company's methods is as follows: * Angus Reid Public Opinion collects its data through online
internet survey With the application of probability sampling in the 1930s, surveys became a standard tool for empirical research in social sciences, marketing, and official statistics. The methods involved in survey data collection are any of a number of ways in ...
s, and demographically weights its data to be representative of the whole
population Population typically refers to the number of people in a single area, whether it be a city or town, region, country, continent, or the world. Governments typically quantify the size of the resident population within their jurisdiction using a ...
in terms of age,
gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures u ...
,
social class A social class is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the Upper class, upper, Middle class, middle and Working class, lower classes. Membership in a social class can for ...
, the region of the country lived in and
newspaper A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports a ...
readership. Past vote weighting is used, and is calculated separately for respondents from
Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...
and respondents from
England and Wales England and Wales () is one of the three legal jurisdictions of the United Kingdom. It covers the constituent countries England and Wales and was formed by the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542. The substantive law of the jurisdiction is Eng ...
, whilst those saying they do not know how they will vote are asked which party they are leaning towards, and any responses to this are used as a full response, whilst those still unsure being discounted from the final calculation of levels of party support. * BMG Research is a Birmingham-based social research company which carried out its first political poll from 25 to 27 April 2015 for PoliticsHome, May2015 and the
Electoral Reform Society The Electoral Reform Society (ERS) is an independent campaigning organisation based in the United Kingdom which promotes electoral reform. It seeks to replace first-past-the-post voting with proportional representation, advocating the single t ...
, with the voting intention questions being commissioned by May2015. BMG carries out its fieldwork online and weights for past vote and likelihood to vote with people who did not vote at the previous General Election weighted down by 50%. BMG Research is not a member of the British Polling Council but is applying for membership and abides by BPC rules in carrying out opinion polls. It is recognised by the BPC as a market researcher. *
ComRes Savanta ComRes is a market research consultancy based in London, England. Established in 2003 as Communicate Research Ltd, ComRes was a founding member of the British Polling Council in 2004, and is one of the UK's best known polling companies. ...
uses both telephone interviews and online surveys to collect its data; all polls will be conducted using one method exclusively. It is not shown explicitly in the tables in this article whether a particular poll has been conducted by telephone or online but in general those polls with the smaller samples (~1,000) are telephone polls and those with the larger samples (~2,000) were conducted online. The data tables will confirm how the poll was conducted. Whatever the data collection method, all respondents are weighted according to gender, age, social class, household tenure, work status, number of cars owned and whether or not they have taken a foreign holiday in the previous three years. Both telephone and online polls are weighted according to past vote in the last general election, whilst telephone polls also use data from the last 12 ComRes telephone-conducted opinion polls. ComRes compensates for those respondents who says they do not know by asking them instead which party they most clearly identify with, whilst all respondents are weighted according to likelihood to vote on a scale of one to ten, with respondents saying their likelihood of voting is less than four being discounted entirely, and respondents saying their likelihood is more than five being progressively weighted, with a five-out-of-ten likelihood being weighted as half a response and a ten-out-of-ten likelihood being weighted as one whole response. * ICM also collects its data through telephone interviews, and also demographically weights its respondents according to their gender, age, social class, household tenure, work status and the region of the country they live in. It weights respondents according to the levels of support a party received in the previous general election and the last 25 ICM opinion polls and, if a past vote is given, this is used to allocate a response to those who say they do not know how they will vote, although such a response is counted as only half of one whole response. ICM also weights its respondents as to how likely they say they are to vote, with respondents who say they are certain to vote given a higher weighting than those who are not as certain, while if a respondent did not vote at the previous general election, their turnout weighting is automatically reduced by half. *
Ipsos MORI Ipsos MORI was the name of a market research company based in London, England which is now known as Ipsos and still continues as the UK arm of the global Ipsos group. It was formed by a merger of Ipsos UK and MORI in October 2005. The company ...
collects its data through telephone interviews, and weights its respondents to be demographically representative of gender, age, social class, work status, work sector, household tenure and the region of the country they live in. Data is not weighted according to the way respondents voted at the previous general election, any respondents who say they do not know how they will vote are discounted, and only the responses of people who says they are certain to vote are included in the final calculation of levels of support for each party. *
Lord Ashcroft Michael Anthony Ashcroft, Baron Ashcroft, (born 4 March 1946) is a British-Belizean businessman, pollster and politician. He is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. Ashcroft founded Michael A. Ashcroft Associates in 1972 and is ...
commissions and publishes polls as Lord Ashcroft Polls. On 12 May 2014 he published the first in a series of opinion polls to be published weekly up to the 2015 UK general election. These polls are carried out by telephone, and are past-vote weighted with an allowance for false recall. They are also weighted for likelihood to vote, with a proportion of Don't Knows reallocated to how respondents said they voted at the 2010 general election. The Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and UKIP are prompted for. Lord Ashcroft does not disclose the organisations which carry out his fieldwork, but states that a number are used. Initially, the methodology of the weekly Ashcroft National Poll was said to be similar to that used by Populus before they moved to polling online. He is not a BPC member; he was initially invited to join but the BPC now states that he is not eligible as he does not work for multiple clients. *
Opinium Opinium is a market research and insight agency established on 7 September 2007. It is headquartered in New York and London. Its Chief Executive is James Endersby. The agency works across five practice areas: Brand & Communications, Product & Se ...
surveys are conducted online via web interviewing, drawing a sample of responses from the company's
panel Panel may refer to: Arts and media Visual arts * Panel (comics), a single image in a comic book, comic strip or cartoon; also, a comic strip containing one such image *Panel painting, in art, either one element of a multi-element piece of art ...
of around 30,000 people. This sample is representative of the adult population of Great Britain in the areas of age, gender, regional location, working status and social grade, as according to the latest
Office for National Statistics The Office for National Statistics (ONS; cy, Swyddfa Ystadegau Gwladol) is the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority, a non-ministerial department which reports directly to the UK Parliament. Overview The ONS is responsible for th ...
data. Responses from different demographic groups are handled appropriately to compensate for differential response rates in these different groups. *
Populus ''Populus'' is a genus of 25–30 species of deciduous flowering plants in the family Salicaceae, native to most of the Northern Hemisphere. English names variously applied to different species include poplar (), aspen, and cottonwood. The we ...
conducts its surveys over the telephone, and weights all respondents according to gender, age, social class, household tenure, work status, the number of cars they own, and whether they have taken a foreign holiday in the past three years, to be representative of the whole
electorate Electorate may refer to: * The people who are eligible to vote in an election, especially their number e.g. the term ''size of (the) electorate'' * The dominion of a Prince-elector The prince-electors (german: Kurfürst pl. , cz, Kurfiřt, ...
. Respondents are weighted according to their past vote and the levels of support for each party recorded in the previous 20 Populus opinion polls. Respondents who say they do not know how they will vote are allocated according to how they voted at the last general election, at a reduced weighting of 0.5 for previous Conservative or Labour voters and 0.3 for previous Liberal Democrat voters. All respondents are also weighted according to how likely they are to vote, with those certain to vote given the highest weighting. * Survation opinion polling is achieved through online surveys, and all data is weighted to represent the wider population of Great Britain in terms of gender, age, socio-economic group, religion, how the respondent previously voted, and stated likelihood of voting in the next general election. Respondents who are either undecided or refuse to state how they would vote are excluded from the final results, unless they have provided details of how they have voted in the past, in which case, that information is used to adjust the results. * TNS-BMRB interviews a representative sample of adults aged 18+. All interviews are conducted in respondents' homes, although the voting intention data is collected using self-completion methods. The data is weighted twice: firstly to match population totals for age, sex, social grade, working status, presence of children, 2010 voting patterns and region; and secondly, for voting intention questions only, an additional 'likelihood-to-vote' weight is applied. *
YouGov YouGov is a British international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm, headquartered in the UK, with operations in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. In 2007, it acquired US company Polimetrix, and sinc ...
collects its data through an online survey, and weights its respondents to be representative of the population as a whole in terms of age, gender, social class, identification with a political party, region of the country and newspaper readership. Respondents are weighted according to how they voted in the previous general election in order to achieve a sample that is reflective of each party's level of support at that election, whilst those respondents who say they do not know who they will vote for are discounted from calculating levels of support for each party.


See also

*
Sub-national opinion polling for the 2015 United Kingdom general election Polling was conducted separately in the constituent countries of the United Kingdom. Of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, England had 533, Scotland had 59, Wales had 40 and Northern Ireland had 18. England Scotland Wales ...
* Opinion polling in United Kingdom constituencies (2010–15) * Opinion polling for the 2017 United Kingdom general election * 2014 European Parliament election in the United Kingdom *
List of political parties in the United Kingdom The Electoral Commission's Register of Political Parties lists the details of political parties registered to fight elections in the United Kingdom, including their registered name. Under current electoral law, including the Registration o ...
*
List of United Kingdom by-elections (2010–present) This is a list of parliamentary by-elections in the United Kingdom since 2010, with the names of the incumbent and victor and their respective parties. Where seats changed political party at the election, the result is highlighted: blue for a Co ...
*
Opinion polling for the 2010 United Kingdom general election In the run-up to the general election of 2010, several polling organisations carried out opinion polling in regards to voting intention in Great Britain (i.e. the UK excluding Northern Ireland, which is usually excluded from such voting intenti ...


References and notes

;Notes PThe dates when the fieldwork for this poll was carried out are unknown; therefore, the date of publication has been given. ;References


External links


May2015
election polls and predictions
2015 UK parliamentary election forecast

UK Polling Report
blog *
UK Polling Report
2015 election guide
Ipsos MORI
archive of all pollsters' polls {{Opinion polling for United Kingdom elections 2015 United Kingdom general election Opinion polling for United Kingdom general elections Opinion polling for United Kingdom votes in the 2010s