First polling on Trump and my thoughts on Stoke and Copeland

As the controversy around the Trump travel ban rages on, we're starting to get the first snap polling on British opinions on it. Sky Data found that the public oppose a British replication of the ban 49-34, and by a slightly narrower margin of 49-38 they support cancelling the US President's state visit.

There's also a petition doing the rounds, as those of you that subscribe to the article alerts will have seen, that's now gone over 1.6 million signatures. As I wrote, that number is pretty meaningless on its own, because there's no option to disagree, but the breakdown by constituency is often interesting.

As Rob Ford at Manchester pointed out to me, the breakdown neatly encapsulates Labour's dilemma – 17 of the top 20 and 15 of the bottom 20 (excluding Northern Ireland) are held by the opposition.

It turns out that the strongest correlation (+0.91) is not with the Remain vote itself (+0.82), but with the seat-by-seat breakdown of the signatures for the petition demanding a second referendum. It seems that people in some places just love signing petitions…

Over the weekend I joined the Seb Payne and Andy Bounds for the FT Politics podcast (from 14:50) to talk about Stoke and Copeland and I also wrote a piece for them on the two by-elections.

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