Southern Comfort

An internal FG poll (where are these all coming from?) in the Indo today

suggests the following figures in Cork SC;

FF 22%
FG 40%
LP 26%
GP 5%
SF 5%
OTH 2%

No mention of the polling company (it says “conducted by FG” but I think we can assume that FG haven’t suddenly become professional pollsters!). If you follow the link it shows Coveney topping the poll, Clune safe and Buttimer well down on 8%, so it was probably leaked by someone close to the latter, particularly as FG’s (very faint) hopes would depend on a significant amount of Coveney’s vote moving to him.

That would be reasonably close to uniform swing, with FG somewhat over-performing by 4-6% (just about at the limit of the moe). But I suppose it is their poll! 😉 5% though is probably moe though so nothing dodgy here I’d say, this is the sort of area they could expect a swing slightly above the national average, so looks OK to me.

FF at 22% is in the 20-23% range of the Lansdowne/RedC polls in the spreadsheet, and so no surprise in this, but Martin being comfortable is interesting, as there’s been a lot of whispering that he might not get the seat. This suggests that there’ll be no great surprise here.

LP at 26% are above RedC and below Lansdowne (within the moe of the average), but hot favourites to get the second seat. More interesting (to me) is that the split reported between Lynch and Desmond is very(very) good. I was suggesting on p.ie that as a woman cllr candidate from a different part of the constituency she should get at least a third of the LP vote (that’s the assumption my spreadsheet makes) but was told by another poster (locke) from there that it’d be 4:1. However, in this poll it’s even better at 14.5 / 11.5. Given 5% each for GP and SF, that’d probably be Desmond in without needing significant FF transfers or FG leakages. Interesting, as this is one of those constituencies that FG are adamant that the LP target seat is unattainable, but one of their polls makes Desmond favourite to take the seat.

GP and SF as I say are at the moe, so you can’t really learn much from that, although interestingly, both are at exactly average the uniform swing in the RedC and Lansdowne polls.

All in all, it looks genuine enough given the moe, and if true pretty much confirms that the national picture is translating more or less locally.