Rishi Sunak fails to win back Conservative support in Wales, YouGov poll reveals
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has so far failed to win back the Welsh votes lost after Liz Truss' short premiership.
The Conservatives are still a long way off from a parliamentary election win - clawing back just 2% of votes - and are still less popular than when Liz Truss was PM.
The latest YouGov poll, conducted for ITV Cymru Wales and Cardiff University, shows 20% of those who answered would vote to keep the current UK Government, with the majority (49%) opting for Labour.
Westminster voting intention:
Conservative - 20% (+2)Labour - 49% (-2)Lib Dem - 5% (+1)Plaid Cymru - 14% (+1)Reform UK - 9% (+1)Green - 3% (-1)Other - 1% (-1)
Back in September, during the shortest tenure of any prime minister in history, the majority of people in Wales said they did not trust Liz Truss' government to make the right decisions for the country.
After her 45 days in office, Rishi Sunak took over and Westminster voting intention for the Conservative party was at just 18% - down by 5% - and support for Labour reached its highest in a decade.
Dr Jac Larner, from Cardiff University's Welsh Governance Centre, said the real story here is that there has been "no change".
"Labour at the moment still look like they're going to win half of the popular vote, which would still be a very strong, historic, performance if it happened at an election," he told ITV Wales.
"The Conservatives are still doing very poor compared to what they did even just 12 months ago. They're hovering around 20%."
Sometimes new prime ministers benefit from a "bounce" in popularity because they are new, fresh or being given the benefit of the doubt, but Dr Larner says we can "definitively rule this out for Rishi Sunak".
He added: "I think it's shown how badly damaged attitudes towards the Conservative party were when Rishi Sunak took over.
"When people start switching away from parties - as has happened with the Conservative Party in particular - the people who voted for them in 2019 for the first time, seem to be the people now almost entirely saying they would not support that party now.
"People don't flip flop between parties very quickly. Once they've made that decision it can be very difficult to win people back and that's a real problem that Rishi Sunak faces."
The picture is much the same for Members of the Senedd in Wales, according to those polled. The Labour Party are still the majority preference and the Conservatives lag behind Wales' second preference, Plaid Cymru, whose support has remained steady.
Senedd voting intention:
Conservative - 18% (+1)Labour - 43% (-1)Lib Dem - 4% (-2)Plaid Cymru - 20% (no change)Reform UK - 9% (+2)Green - 4% (+1)Other - 1% (-1)
Dr Larner said: "It's almost undoubtable that the wider UK context is having an influence on Senedd voting intention. Wales has its own political system and sometimes separate political parties but they're definitely not immune from what's going on in Westminster.
"There's a couple of things going on there - first is the continued popularity of Mark Drakeford and of Welsh labour, which really picked up during the pandemic and has stayed there, and the other thing that's hurting the Conservative party in Wales is most likely what's happening at a UK level.
"From previous ITV polling, people don't really know who the Conservative figures in Wales are and when it comes to the Conservatives, they tend to focus on what's happening in London.
"That's different with Plaid supporters and Labour supporters where the Welsh figures there and the Welsh parties are particularly important to them."
YouGov polled a representative sample of 1,081 Welsh voters, aged 16+, between February 3 and February 7 for ITV Cymru Wales and Cardiff University.
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