Lord Ashcroft Polls

By Lord Ashcroft

By Lord Ashcroft

See the key results from our 23,000-sample poll of the 15 countries around the world where King Charles III is head of state. How do they feel about the monarchy? Would they vote to keep it, or become a republic? What would they expect the result to be now – and in ten years’ time? Click on the country to see what the population thinks.

Click here to see the map.

By Lord Ashcroft

This article first appeared in the Daily Mail.

Nobody elected the King. Depending on your point of view, this is either an indefensible outrage or the beauty of a constitutional monarchy: a head of state above the grubbiness of politics, who can therefore unite people whatever their allegiance. But if the royals don’t need our votes, they still need our consent. Without public support, the monarchy would be on borrowed time.

According to my latest poll of more than 11,000 people around the UK, the King has no immediate worries on this front. Voters in England, Scotland and Wales said that in a referendum tomorrow they would keep the monarchy by comfortable margins; only in Northern Ireland, with its own constitutional debate, did voters lean towards the idea of a republic.

There were vast differences by age, however: while three quarters of British voters aged 65 or over would vote for the status quo, 18 to 24s would choose a republic by 34% to 28%, with nearly four in ten of them saying they didn’t know or would not vote. And while white voters said they would keep the monarchy by a 40-point margin, Asian-heritage voters backed a republic by 2 points, and those from black African or Caribbean backgrounds by 14 points.

Nor does the population divide neatly into roundheads and cavaliers (more…)

By Lord Ashcroft

Our polling on the monarchy has identified five segments of opinion on the issue: Committed Royalists, who strongly support the royal family and the Crown; Mainstream Monarchists who back the institution but recognise the need to change with the times; Neutral Pragmatists, who lean towards the status quo largely because they think the alternative would be worse; Modern Republicans, who see the monarchy as divisive and worry about its colonial legacy, and Angry Abolitionists, who think the royals care little for the country and believe the institution has no place in the modern world.

To find out which you are, take our survey here.

By Lord Ashcroft

By Lord Ashcroft

Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine a year ago today. My latest polling reveals how optimism has grown in Ukraine, how Putin has so far largely kept control of the narrative in Russia, and how the British and American public see their country’s role in the conflict.

Allies and aid

Asked whether various countries and organisations were doing enough to help, nearly three quarters of Ukrainians in our survey said yes for Britain; 71% did so for the US. (more…)

By Lord Ashcroft

This article was first published in the Daily Mail.

I first visited Ukraine in 2018 to meet soldiers in the trenches of the Donbas region in the east, who were defending their country from Russian-backed separatists. I have been fortunate to return several times, and I’m in Kyiv again today to show my support on the anniversary of the invasion.

Nobody who has followed events over the last year could fail to be moved by the resilience and determination of the Ukrainian people. My latest polling only underlines that.

Most people here are prepared for the war to last months or even years longer, and I have found no appetite for any compromise with Russia or trading territory for peace.

‘Victory is the 1991 borders [the official territory declared when Ukraine proclaimed itself an independent state, free from the USSR] and joining NATO, as well as returning Crimea to Ukraine. That is a minimum,’ as one Kyiv resident said.

But even after that, the threat from Russia would remain, probably longer than Putin himself (more…)

By Lord Ashcroft

Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP government have had an unusually tough few weeks. As my new poll of more than 2,000 voters in Scotland confirms, the damage is largely self-inflicted. In particular, most Scots – including many former SNP supporters – oppose Sturgeon’s position on gender recognition and the idea of framing the next election as a de facto referendum on independence.

Gender recognition

On the issue behind Sturgeon’s latest confrontation with Westminster – the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill – I found only just over one in five Scots (22%) saying they supported the Bill and that London was wrong to block it. Nearly twice as many (43%) said they opposed the Bill and the UK government was right to block it. Overall, more than half (54%) said they opposed the reforms, with 29% in favour. Half said the UK government was right or within its rights to stop the legislation, with 33% saying it was wrong to do so (more…)

By Lord Ashcroft

This article was first published in Holyrood magazine.

To the four prime ministers who have quit Downing Street since Nicola Sturgeon took up residence at Bute House, the First Minister must have seemed enviably immune to the laws of political gravity. If those laws now seem to be reasserting themselves, my latest poll of over 2,000 Scots helps explain.

Much of Sturgeon’s success lies in her skilful positioning as a powerful voice for Scotland against an indifferent or hostile Tory Westminster. In the row over the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, that strategy has backfired. My research highlights two main reasons why.

The first is that Scots disagree with her about the issue itself, and that many side with Westminster over Holyrood on the fate of the Bill (more…)

By Lord Ashcroft

As the new Congress convenes, I have brought together into a single report the research I conducted during the campaign for the November 2022 elections. Its implications go well beyond a single set of midterms. The model that we use, and the findings reported here – based on a poll of 20,000 Americans and extensive focus groups in the key states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida and Arizona – help us understand the landscape of opinion in the United States, the divisions that continue to define American politics, and the forces that will be at work in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election and beyond.

The research also helps explain why the red wave scheduled for November never materialised, despite economic pain and voters’ clear view that the country was heading in the wrong direction, with the Biden administration’s policies making things worse rather than better. Our analysis shows that we saw, in effect, one midterm but two elections, with different parts of the electorate voting according to completely separate sets of perspectives and priorities. Meanwhile, as the exit polls confirmed, nearly as many voters treated the election as a referendum on the former president as on the incumbent – hence the result that seemed to defy political gravity.

The temptation for the Democrats will be to take the result as an endorsement (more…)