There is further good news for Simon Harris in today’s final instalment of the Irish Times/Ipsos B&A opinion poll, the first of the general election campaign.
A clear majority of voters who express a preference say they want Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael back in government after the election, if not with the Greens, then with someone else. Approaching half – 45 per cent – of all respondents favour such an outcome. The next most popular combination, a left-wing government led by Sinn Féin, garners only 18 per cent support.
And voters are clear about their preferred leader of that government – Simon Harris, on 34 per cent, is streets ahead of Micheál Martin, on 16 per cent, though the gap between the two has narrowed by five points since September.
Combined with the findings of the poll reported on Friday, which saw Fine Gael enjoying a six-point lead over both Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin (25 per cent to 19 per cent for each), this is all as good as Harris could have reasonably hoped for at this stage of the campaign.
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Of course, it’s relatively early days. Fianna Fáil’s strength on the ground will be worth something, and Fine Gael has – as has been well advertised – a lot of new candidates trying to hold seats. Sinn Féin is trying to recapture the 2020 mood for change, relying heavily on the “100 years of FF-FG” theme. And there is a mood for change among many voters – there always is.
But there is also a wariness of change, too, and that appears to have been exacerbated by the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States last week. Trump’s campaign promises – and the shape of his cabinet appointments this week suggest that he is not planning on resiling from them – suggest specific pressures on the Irish economic model and a more unstable world generally.
Irish voters have noticed: more than half of all voters (56 per cent) say they are now more worried about the future as a result of Trump’s election. And that in turn is affecting their attitude towards change. A clear majority of voters (56 per cent) prefer “moderate” change to “radical” change, favoured by 35 per cent. Those numbers have shifted by eight points since before Trump’s election when they were last asked in September – radical change is down by three, moderate change up by five. A further 7 per cent are wary of any change at all.
People are getting cautious. The “let’s just take it easy and not do anything rash” lobby is growing.
Have a look at the contrast with 2020: then, the first poll of the campaign showed that the numbers wanting radical change and moderate change were more or less evenly divided. Now the moderates are miles bigger.
If you are Mary Lou McDonald – or indeed any of the other, smaller left-wing parties going to the voters offering deep and profound changes in the way the country is run – that is not an encouraging trend.
There are other headwinds for Sinn Féin too. The recent scandals in the party – though the pollsters adopted the neutral formula of “Sinn Féin in the news lately” in order not to skew the responses – have made almost a third of voters (32 per cent) less likely to vote for the party. That figure includes 11 per cent of Sinn Féin voters and 31 per cent of Independent/other voters.
In addition, the party continues to attract the highest negative sentiment – four in 10 voters (40 per cent) don’t want to see it in government, an increase of 3 per cent.
And yet on balance – given where the party was a few weeks ago and the electoral disaster it suffered at the Euros and local elections in May – Sinn Féin is likely to be content with this poll in the round.
It doesn’t look to be on course of government at this point – at this stage in 2020 the Sinn Féin surge was well under way – but it has stopped the bleeding and is performing reasonably well on the campaign trail.
People are not, clearly, thrilled with this Government, nor are they greeting the prospect of its re-election with unabashed joy. Rather, a plurality of them are accepting that in the circumstances it might be the best thing.
That can change, of course. Campaigns change things. They can take a swerve and derail the most complacent assumptions. But unless something big happens in the next two weeks, the current Coalition, or something like it, will be strong favourites to return to government.
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