Despite headlines to the contrary, poll shows drop in Government support

I DON’T know whether you heard former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds on Marian Finucane’s radio programme last Sunday.

Discussing the latest political opinion poll, he seemed to re-open the whole Bertiegate affair, when he described himself as shocked by the revelations a few months ago about the contributions the current Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, received in Manchester. (At the time, of course, Albert was Taoiseach and Bertie was Finance Minister.) There was no way, Albert declared, that he would have allowed Bertie to accept that money had Bertie asked his permission, and there was no way a finance minister should accept such money.

In the overall scheme of things, perhaps, it’s not such a big deal. Just another reminder that, in politics, nothing ever really goes away. Just when you think you’ve lived down some embarrassment, it pops up again somewhere. Albert’s intervention in the affair, even at this late stage, might well serve to remind people of something that, apparently, they would rather forget.

Mind you, if election strategists across the political system were listening to Marian Finucane, they were probably doing it while poring over the entrails of the opinion poll. Published in the Sunday Tribune, and conducted by the well-known firm IMS Millward Brown, it was particularly interesting because it was the first public opinion poll conducted in the countdown to the election.

At face value, it provides comfort to the Government; the Government parties combined are showing at 44%, and the parties that could make up the rainbow alternative come in at 39%. The headline writers all seem to agree that, as things stand, the Government is heading for re-election and the opposition for further disappointment.

The party strategists, who have been reading a lot of private poll data as well as the published polls, won’t have seen it that way at all. Firstly, they will have noted that there has been a two-point drop in Government support since the last IMS poll, and an increase of three points in support for the combined opposition. That’s a swing of five points. Last October, the Government was 10 points ahead. Now it’s five.

What happened in the meantime? Only the biggest giveaway budget in the history of the State, that’s all: billions in extra spending plans, billions in tax cuts. And still its lead has been cut in half, with three to four months and a lot of opinion polls still to come before the general election is even called.

I was a political strategist for years, and I still get a little bit of an itch as we get closer to an election. Mind you, I believe every citizen should — there is nothing more exciting about our system than the fact every few years we have an absolute right to tell the Government to get lost and to replace it with something better, or, indeed, to give it our approval. The closer and tighter the contest is, the more exciting, and challenging, that choice is.

I can tell you one thing: based on last weekend’s poll, we’re in for a tight and exciting contest. The headline writers might have thought the opposition should be worried. The party strategists, in all parties, will have come to the opposite conclusion.

The first conclusion election strategists will have reached is this: the opposition might not yet have momentum but if the figures are right, the Government has lost momentum. A lot of momentum.

Watch out for that word in the months ahead. Momentum is often the key ingredient in winning or losing an election. “The big mo” they used to call it in US elections. It’s hard to describe exactly what momentum is, but you will know it when you see it. Bill Clinton got a huge burst of momentum from coming second in a primary election when he was supposed to be hammered, and it carried him all the way to the White House.

In the run-up to Irish elections in the past, we’ve seen “momentum moments” that had a huge impact on the outcome. Who’ll ever forget the last six weeks of the Mary Robinson election, for instance?

AND if it is the case that the Government, in its quest for re-election, is losing momentum at this stage, then it’s in deep trouble. The Fianna Fáil strategists, in particular, will have had a troubled weekend poring over the party’s 39% showing.

Here’s why. In the six months prior to the last election, there were seven IMS opinion polls, five of them in the months of the election itself. They were published in different newspapers and weren’t strictly comparable to one another in all cases. But the methodology was very similar from one poll to the next. And in the order in which the results appeared, here are the forecasts those polls made in respect of the votes Fianna Fáil was likely to win. Poll number one predicted 54%. Poll two, 52%. Poll three, 49%. Poll four, 48%. Poll five, 49%. Poll six, 51%. Poll seven, 50%.

Seven opinion polls, one after the other, predicting nothing less than 48% and nothing more than 54%. Those polls were the main reason there was so much excited commentary the last time about the possibility of an overall majority for the party. They were the main reason Michael McDowell climbed a lamp post to say no thanks to single-party government.

In the event, and despite the proximity of the polls to the outcome, Fianna Fáil got 41.5% in the actual election. Were the polls wildly wrong? Did people change their minds at the last minute? Or do opinion polls always, for historical reasons, tend to overstate support for Fianna Fáil?

There is some evidence to suggest that all three of these questions deserve a yes answer, at least in part. But the thing that strikes real fear into the hearts of Fianna Fáil strategists is the fact that if the party is at 39% now, there is a real possibility that the result of the election could be anything from six to 10 points worse. That’s what history is telling them.

As it is, 39% of the vote, strictly translated into seats, would yield only 65 TDs. And if the next opinion polls show any downward dip in that figure, panic could begin to spread through the existing candidates. If there is any sign whatever that the Government’s loss of momentum has been replaced by a surge, however small, in momentum for the opposition, that panic would deepen.

It would make the management of constituencies impossible because as far as the candidates will be concerned, it will be every man for himself. And negative momentum could make it extremely unlikely the party would be able to attract the second preferences which have been a feature of its successes in the past two elections.

One opinion poll, of course, doesn’t give a full picture. The next few will tell us whether the Government has indeed lost momentum. But, for now, it’s all to play for.