More people think the EU is a 'good thing' so why would they still vote to leave?

Here's a link to a post I put up on the Opinium site a few weeks ago. It looks at the divergence between the two EU questions we ask regularly on political polls. The first asks whether the UK being a member of the European Union is a 'good thing' or a 'bad thing' while the second (more widely reported) asks whether respondents would vote to leave or to stay if there was a referendum tomorrow.

Until recently these have tracked fairly closely but now the percentage saying it's a "good thing" has overtaken the figure for "bad thing" for the first time while more people would still vote to leave than stay.

Anyway, click the link to find out why.

A two tiered debate in 2015 looks more and more possible

I don't remember where I first read it but the most interesting solution to the "Farage" question when it comes to party leader debates in 2015 is to have two tiers or debates like they do in Germany and other countries with multi-party systems.

You take the two candidates most likely to be prime minister, in 2015 this will be David Cameron and Ed Miliband, and put them in a debate on their own and then take the leaders of all the other smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats and UKIP, potentially the SNP or Plaid depending on where it's being broadcast, and maybe the Greens and put them in another debate by themselves. This gives everyone exposure but doesn't create the sort of trainwreck that we saw with the Republican debates in the US in 2012 where you had one, maybe two, serious candidates and several others who were there to get exposure or sell books.

Obviously Nigel Farage would prefer a four-man (and it is men, how strange that 25 years after Thatcher resigned we'd still only have male leaders) debate with the leaders of the Conservatives, Labour, the Lib Dems and UKIP while Nick Clegg may want this or the same set-up as 2010. But it's hard to see David Cameron agreeing to it given his apparent regrets over the 2010 debates.

Having a separate Cameron vs. Miliband debate would no doubt work best for Cameron and the broadcasters would probably come around as well. The only sticking point would likely have been Miliband.

Until now.

In our polling for the Clegg-Farage debate last night we asked about whether voters would support or oppose this (it's near the bottom, just before we traumatised hundreds of people by forcing them to choose between Clegg and Farage for prime minister). The results were a bit mixed which suggests that people didn't really read it too carefully but as we get closer to 2015, the German option seems more and more like the only real debate compromise we'll get.