From the poll in last weekend's Business Post a rather basic fact appears to have been overlooked which is that as many FF people as FG people have yet to be convinced of the merits of the Treaty.
Quoting from the Post article. "The intensive campaigning by the new Taoiseach Brian Cowen, who has risked his political honeymoon on the success of the referendum, is bearing fruit with Fianna Fáil voters who now favour the treaty by a huge margin. For the first time, an absolute majority of Fianna Fáil voters say they will support the treaty.
However, despite an active Fine Gael campaign and the appeal by party leader Enda Kenny to ‘‘put the country first’’, Fine Gael voters are evenly divided between the Yes and No side. This may be explained by many voters identifying the referendum as a proposal from the government and, therefore, something to be opposed."
The full report as posted by RED C
So FG support is supposedly 28% and FF is on 40%, and we heard that FG is evenly divided on the subject while an "absolute majority" of FFers are supportive of the treaty which I believe we are to take to mean 50%+1 of the FF support meaning 20% of the electorate. Allowing for the same amount of undecided voters within FF and FG and the general electorate which is 25%. So we get
FF 40%, of which 20% Yes, 10% undecided, 10% No.
FG 28% of which 10.5% Yes, 7% undecided, and 10.5% No.
Since this is a poll, and we're dealing with a margin of error of +/- 3%, I think it is reasonable to suggest that An Taoiseach Brian Cowen has as many of his own supporters to convince to not vote No as does FG. And he actually has more voters in total to win over than does FG.
After all when you go into the polling station a single FG vote is worth no more that a single FF vote.
I can't say I fully agree. Until Red C tell us exactly what the %'s are among supporters of all parties, this is speculation. However I do recall from the previous Red C poll that about 33% of FGers were on the yes side and about 28% against, that a majority of PD voters were against, that more Labour voters were against than for, that SF voters were against (55% perhaps) and that most Greens who had an opinion were in favour. With the 5% increase in the no's in the most recent Red C poll and only a 3% increase in the yesses, it is quite possible that the no's have grown among the non-FF parties.
ReplyDeleteI would agree about that until we could see proper raw data that it is primarily speculation, but isn't that what was done in reaction to the SBP piece? Remember the undecided numbers were higher in the previous poll to and it is possible that the shift came from there.
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