Jeremy Corbyn surges among Labour members – but trails with the wider public

Polls show Corbyn trouncing Labour rivals, despite the public backing new leadership

 

Support for Jeremy Corbyn as leader among Labour Party members has increased four percent over the last fortnight, according to a new YouGov poll.

Corbyn also leads by 20 per cent against his two challengers, Owen Smith and Angela Eagle – who are expected to reach a deal today on which of them will run against him.

YouGov’s poll for the Times compared Corbyn’s rating with an earlier poll taken in late June, and finds those who say the Labour leader is ‘doing well’ is upto 55 per cent, with three per cent saying they ‘don’t know’.

Times YouGov poll 19 7 16

The new poll also finds 54 per cent of members would put Corbyn as their first preference in a leadership vote, way ahead of Angela Eagle on 21 per cent and Owen Smith on 15 per cent. Nine per cent said they don’t know.

In a head-to-head contest between Corbyn and Smith, the incumbent is ahead by 22 points, with 56 to Smith’s 34, while a Corbyn v Eagle race has the current leader 24 points ahead, with 58 per cent.

The results are in stark contrast to a ComRes poll released on Friday which found Corybn trailing behind Prime Minister Theresa May among the British public. 

May leads on Corbyn by nearly 40 points, with 58 per cent to Corbyn’s 19, on who would make a better Prime Minister.

55 per cent said May is a ‘strong leader’, with only 13 per cent saying the same for Corbyn, while 48 per cent said May ‘is good on the world stage’, compared to Corbyn’s 11 per cent.

42 per cent said Corbyn ‘understands ordinary people’, beating May’s 31 per cent, while the two came out more or less even (given the margin for error) on being ‘principled’, with May at 44 per cent and Corbyn’s 43.

On the leadership contest, a majority of the public think Owen Smith and Angela Eagle have a better chance of winning a general election than Jeremy Corbyn, with Smith on 43 per cent vs Corbyn’s 27, and Eagle on 36 per cent vs Corbyn’s 32.

However, ComRes found Corbyn ahead with Labour voters compared with his rivals by similar margins to today’s YouGov poll – 50 per cent vs 23 per cent against Eagle, 44 per cent vs 26 per cent against Smith.

See: Jeremy Corbyn lacks support from union members, says YouGov poll

8 Responses to “Jeremy Corbyn surges among Labour members – but trails with the wider public”

  1. Richard MacKinnon

    These figures are very reassuring if you are a true Labour supporter. Jeremy has plenty of time to sort things out. But he has to implement to following plan. The sequence is important. First he has to lay out the consequences of disloyalty – which is deselection. He also has to make it clear before the vote that in no circumstances will any Labour MP resign from The Party should he win, remain as a member of parliament and join another party. This course of action has to be put to the conspirators, it has to be made public and a denial sought now. This is very important because this is what they will do if not challenged. Second he has to get a commitment, for or against, from all his MPs before the poll. Third he has to see off the coup. Finally, he has to organise the deselection process (this will be a token gesture as they will jump before they are pushed).
    That has to be the way or else wounds will never heal and Labour’s spiral to political oblivion will continue. If he acts quickly and decisively over the next few weeks he has all the time he needs to lay out his policies, with united Labour vision and with it rein in Theresa May.

  2. Jacko

    58 vs 19. 55 vs 13. 48 vs 11. Gee, I wonder who’ll the next General Election….

  3. Jacko

    Labour is finished as an electoral force under Corbyn.

    Firstly, the world is moving Right, not Left. Look at the election results in 2010, 2015, Brexit, the rise of nationalist right-wing parties across Europe and Trump in the US. Labour has to overcome this shift of sentiment. And to believe you could possibly do this with a man that only 19% think would make a better PM than the incumbent -it’s delusional.

    I get the impression that the average writer on here has some romantic notion that there’s going to be a popular uprising of left-wing sentiment that’s going to sweep Corbyn into power on a socialist agenda. All the data points the other way. All you will have under Corbyn is fanatical support by a small number of statistically-insignificant voters that have a niche belief in socialism, unshared by the vast majority of the public. In other words, 27% on election day. That’s where this is leading.

  4. Roy Boffy

    So leading to yet another magnificent victory as in 1983, Robert?

  5. Kev Ball

    May must be tempted to go next year, be a wipeout for the band of brothers.

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