There is very little change in today’s YouGov poll for the Sun. The topline figures are CON 37%(nc), LAB 32%(nc), LDEM 19%(-2). So Labour and the Conservatives are unchanged, and that temporary conference boost for the Lib Dems has started to recede.
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Filed under: Voting Intention, YouGov, YouGov Daily Polls
Dominic Lawson has today penned another of the staple run up to an election campaign articles – the “should polls be banned” job. To start with, I should probably correct all the inaccuracies. Firstly, pollsters do not make much money out of election campaigns (though to declare my obvious interest, it does pay my wages!). While we are very, very busy, it’s the sort of polling that has the lowest margins and brings in the least cash. If Bob Worcester does own an estate on Mustique then I expect he got it from all the commerical and public sector work MORI has done over the decades. He sure didn’t buy it from the proceeds of political polls. Political polling for newspapers is a tiny fraction of polling companies’ income, and is normally done at knock-down, rock-bottom prices. The reason it is done is not to make money, it is the pollster’s shop window. It lets them get publicity and show off their accuracy.
Secondly Lawson questions the accuracy of polls. Yesterday I posted a list of ignorant comments about polls that would invariably pop up during the campaign. Number 8 was “Polls always get it wrong” and it’s gratifying to see it turn up so soon. Lawson correctly says that the pollsters got it wrong in 1992, and didn’t do that much better in 1997. However, the lack of criticism since 1997 is not because the Labour victories continued to obscure poor performance, it is because the pollsters have stopped being wrong. Most got it pretty right in 2001 (and those that didn’t reformed their methods or stopped polling), and the industry got it almost exactly right in 2005. In 2005 all the pollsters were within one or two percent of the right result.
Neither are the adjustments since 1992/1997 additions to help the Conservatives which may not work in other circumstances. The naive characterisation of ICM and Populus’s spiral of silence adjustment is that it is just a matter of adding a couple of points to the Conservatives. It is not – ICM and Populus’s methodology is not so crude and nor it is blindly “pro-Tory”. It is just as capable of accounting for “Bashful Brownites” and the reality is that for at least 6 years it has favoured Labour, not the Conservatives.
Turning to Lawson’s main point, do polls influence people’s vote? Personally, I think it is very likely they do. Whether that is either avoidable or necessarily a bad thing are different questions. It is inevitable that people are influenced by others. They are influenced by polls, they are influenced by their friends and families, they are influenced by political parties leaflets and door knockers… and for that matter, they are influenced by political columnists. Perhaps we should ban them.
Ask yourself, what would happen if there weren’t any polls during the campaign?
Some countries have a ban on polling shortly before elections, Lawson suggests newspapers just not commissioning any. In one sense, this would make very little difference – as I said earlier, pollsters do it for the publicity not the cash, so if newspapers didn’t commission opinion polls in the run up to elections, many polling companies would do them anyway. When MORI lost their contract with the Times they continued doing political polling and publishing it themselves. TNS are currently doing political polls with no client. Angus Reid are giving their polls to PoliticalBetting for free to try and get established in the UK market. In an internet age, polls are going to happen and are going to reach the public whether newspapers buy them or not. Last month 150,000 different people visited this site, hardly any of them via mainstream media websites.
Imagine the alternative then, what if there was a legal ban on publishing opinion polls during the election campaign? Firstly, we can still be certain that the polls would take place. There are plenty of people who would still pay for polls even if they couldn’t be published – the political parties, bookmakers, bankers. Political journalists wouldn’t miss out either, the political parties would all make sure the journalists knew what the polls said.
Already you tend to get columnists and lobby journalists reporting rumours and mumbling about what the party’s private polls say. I always advise people to ignore these figures completely – we can’t see the actual tables, so readers can’t judge for themselves if they are genuine figures or empty spin. In the Lawson scenario, this would still happen – we’d see a nudge and a wink in the newspaper columns as to what the parties private polls say. The only difference would be that the general public would no longer have access to any other data to judge whether it was true or not.
The vacuum of polls would not be filled by staid discussion of policies. People would still want to predict, and the gap would be filled by various inferior attempts to judge attitudes. Unscientific vox pops, rumours and spin from the political parties, BBC have your say comments, bookies odds, the gimmicky news stories you always get about some shop selling red, blue and yellow beer and so on. I am sure the commentariat would still come to their own censensus about the political situation (albeit a less well educated one), would spend just as long speculating about it, and it would probably be just as influential to the public.
Besides, wouldn’t it be rather perverse to ban opinion polls during an election campaign? Short of elections and referenda (which are a very crude tool that records only the answer to a single question) the only legitimate measure of what the public think is the opinion poll. Imperfect as they are, opinion polls are the closest we come to finding out the electorate think about education policy, or what should be done on the economy, whether this or that should be banned, etc, etc. The general election is the core of our democratic system – it would be somewhat odd if we allowed political parties, commentators and columnists to pontificate, but froze out our best way of representing the voice of the general public.
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Filed under: Uncategorized
So far tonight we’ve seen ICM and Opinium polls showing the Conservatives on the up. Unlike the other two polls, YouGov’s fieldwork was conducted entirely on Sunday evening and Monday, so would have been entirely after the Samantha Cameron interview and a good weekend of publicity for the Liberal Democrats including Nick Clegg’s keynote speech on Sunday. It seems to be the latter that has had more of an effect upon YouGov’s figures.
The topline figures are CON 37%(nc), LAB 32%(-1), LDEM 21%(+4). It is the highest YouGov score for the Lib Dems since September and the similar boost they recieved from their party conference then. For what it’s worth the Conservative lead is up by 1 point (the actual result was about 37.49% so it was almost 2) but it’s rather swamped by that surge in Liberal Democrat support.
I expect it is purely a short term publicity boost and we will see the Lib Dem level of support rapidly fade away again during the rest of the week. However, it is a very optimistic sign for the Liberal Democrats and what might happen to their support when they start getting more media coverage in the election campaign proper, and the opportunities that the leader debates present for Nick Clegg.
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Filed under: Voting Intention, YouGov, YouGov Daily Polls
There are three new polls out tonight, so far we have ICM and Opinium with YouGov to follow later. Opinium for the Express have topline figures, with changes from a week ago, of CON 39%(+2), LAB 28%(-2), LDEM 16%(nc). Others are presumably still at or around 17%, continuing the very high level of support for “others” that seems to be common amongst the newer online companies, and which seems to also correspond to a lower level of support for Labour.
The second poll for ICM has topline figures with changes from their poll in the Sunday Telegraph of CON 40%(+2), LAB 31%(nc), LDEM 20%(-1). ICM have others at 9%, so just over half what Opinium have.
Neither polls have massive changes, but both show shift back towards the Conservatives after the recent narrowing. Both were conducted over the weekend, so most of the fieldwork would have been conducted prior to both Nick Clegg’s speech and the Samantha Cameron interview.
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Filed under: ICM, Opinium, Voting Intention, YouGov
As we get closer to the election there will be more and more attention paid to polls, and sadly there will be more and more comments like those below – look, for example, at the horrors that crop up in the BBC “Have Your Say” section. Clearly none of you, my dear readers, would ever leave comments like these, but just in case you come across them elsewhere…
1) The polls are ALL wrong, the real position is obviously X
Er… based on what? The reality is that opinion polling is pretty much the only way of measuring public opinion. We have some straws in the wind from mid-term elections, but they tend to be low turnout protest votes, don’t tend to predict general election results and are anyway quite a long time ago now. Equally a few people point to local government by-elections, but when compared to general election results these normally grossly overestimate Liberal Democrat support. If you think the polls are wrong just because they “feel” wrong to you, it probably says more about what you would like the result to be than anything about the polls.
2) I speak to lots of people and none of them will vote for X!
Actually, so do pollsters, and unless you regularly travel around the whole country and talk to an exceptionally representative demographic spread of people, they do it better than you do. We all have a tendency to be friends with people with similar beliefs and backgrounds, so it is no surprise that many people will have a social circle with largely homogenous political views. Even if you talk to a lot of strangers about politics, you yourself are probably exerting an interviewer effect in the way you ask.
3) How come I’ve never been invited to take part?
There are about 40 million adults in the UK. Each opinion poll involves about 1,000 people. If you are talking about political voting intention polls, then probably under 100 are conducted by phone each year. You can do the sums – if there are 40,000,000 adults in the UK and 100,000 are interviewed for a political opinion poll then on average you will be interviewed once every 400 years. It may be a long wait.
4) They only interview 1000 people, you’d need to interview millions of people to make it accurate!
George Gallup used to use a marvellous analogy when people raised this point: you don’t need to eat a whole bowl of soup to tell if it is too salty, providing it is sufficently stirred a single spoonful will suffice. The same applies to polls, providing an opinion poll accurately reflects the whole electorate (e.g, it has the right balance of male and female, the right age distribution, the right income distribution, people from the different regions of Britain in the correct proportions and so on) it will also accurately reflect their opinion.
In the 1930s in the USA the Literary Digest used to do mail-in polls that really did survey millions of people, literally millions. In 1936 they sent surveys to a quarter of the entire electorate and received 2 million replies. They confidently predicted that Alf Landon would win the imminent US Presidential election with 57% of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes. George Gallup meanwhile used quota sampling to interview just a few thousand people and predicted that Landon would lose miserably to Roosevelt. In reality, Roosevelt beat Landon in a landslide, winning 61% of the vote and 523 electoral votes. Gallup was right, the Digest was wrong.
As long as it is sufficent to dampen down sample error, it isn’t the number of people that were interviewed that matters, it is how representative of the population they are. The Literary Digest interviewed millions, but they were mainly affluent people so their poll wasn’t representative. Gallup interviewed only a few thousand, but his small poll was representative, so he got it right.
5) Polls give the answer the people paying for it want
The answers that most clients are interested in are the truth – polls are very expensive, if you just wanted someone to tell you what you wanted to hear there are far cheaper sources of sycophancy. The overwhelming majority of polling is private commercial polling, not stuff for newspapers, and here clients want the truth, warts and all. Polling companies do political polling for the publicity, there is comparatively little money in it. They want to show off their accuracy to impress big money clients, so it would be downright foolish for them to sacrifice their chances with the clients from whom they make the real money to satisfy the whims of clients who don’t really pay much (not to mention that most pollsters value their own professional integrity too much!)
6) Pollsters only ask the people who they know will give them the answer they want
Responses to polls on newspaper websites and forums sometimes contain bizarre statements to the effect that all the interviews must have been done in London, the Guardian’s newsroom, Conservative Central Office etc. They aren’t, polls are sampled so they have the correct proportion of people from each region of Britain. You don’t have to trust the pollsters on this – the full tables of the polls will normally have breakdowns by demographics including region, so you can see just how many people in Scotland, Wales, the South West, etc answered the poll. You can also see from the tables that the polls contain the right proportions of young people, old people and so on.
7) There is a 3% margin of error, so if the two parties are within 3% of each other they are statistically in a dead heat
No. If a poll shows one party on 46% and one party on 45% then it is impossible to be 95% confident (the confidence interval that the 3% margin of error is based upon) that the first party isn’t actually on 43%, but it is more likely than not that the party on 46% is ahead. The 3% margin of error doesn’t mean that any percentage with that plus or minus 3 point range is equally likely, 50% of the time the “real” figure will be within 1 point of the given figure.
8 ) Polls always get it wrong
In 1992 the pollsters did get it wrong, and most of them didn’t cover themselves in glory in 1997. However, lessons have been learnt and the companies themselves have changed. Most of the companies polling today did not even exist in 1992, and the methods they use are almost unrecognisable – in 1992 everyone used face-to-face polling and there was no political weighting or reallocation of don’t knows. Today polling is either done on the phone or using internet panels, and there are various different methods of political weighting, likelihood to vote filtering and re-allocation of don’t knows. In 2001 most of the pollsters performed well, and in 2005 they were all within a couple of points of the actual result, with NOP getting it bang on.
9) Polls never ask about don’t knows or won’t votes
Actually they always do. The newspapers publishing them may not report the figures, but they will always be available on the pollsters’ own website. Many companies (such as ICM and Populus) not only include don’t knows in their tables, but estimate how they would actually vote if there was an election tomorrow and include a proportion of them in their topline figures.
(There should be an ICM poll later on tonight as well as the YouGov poll at around 10pm – I’ll probably be in a meeting for the ICM poll at least, but will update once I am free)
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Filed under: Methodology
Sky News are reporting tonight’s YouGov poll for the Sunday Times as having topline figures of CON 37%(nc), LAB 33%(-1), LDEM 17%(nc). There is clearly no significant change in the voting intention, and YouGov now seem to be showing lead of around 4 or 5 points, down from a week ago when their lead seemed pretty consistent at 6 points.
UPDATE: Looking at the rest of the YouGov/Sunday Times poll, the public think that the Conservatives are far more likely to cut spending on frontline public services by 50% to 14%. However, they also think the Conservatives are more likely to increase taxes (by 37% to 26%). The implication is that people think the Conservatives are more likely to actually cut down the deficit… but that this is not necessarily a political plus!
With Samantha Cameron about to join the campaign trail, there was also a question asked whether she or Sarah Brown would make the better Prime Ministerial consort – 29% said Sarah Brown to 25% for Samantha Cameron.
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Filed under: Voting Intention, YouGov, YouGov Daily Polls
| 38 | 31 | 18 |
 | 15 Mar | 37 | 32 | 21 | Con +5 |
 | 15 Mar | 39 | 28 | 16 | Con +11 |
 | 14 Mar | 40 | 31 | 20 | Con +9 |
| 12 Mar | 37 | 33 | 17 | Con +4 |
| 11 Mar | 38 | 31 | 21 | Con +7 |
| 11 Mar | 37 | 34 | 17 | Con +3 |
 | 11 Mar | 39 | 26 | 18 | Con +13 |
| 10 Mar | 37 | 32 | 17 | Con +5 |
| 9 Mar | 36 | 32 | 20 | Con +4 |
| 8 Mar | 39 | 34 | 16 | Con +5 |
| 8 Mar | 37 | 30 | 16 | Con +7 |
 | 8 Mar | 37 | 29 | 18 | Con +8 |
| 5 Mar | 38 | 33 | 17 | Con +5 |
 | 5 Mar | 36 | 34 | 18 | Con +2 |
| 4 Mar | 38 | 32 | 17 | Con +6 |
| 4 Mar | 40 | 31 | 18 | Con +9 |
| 3 Mar | 38 | 32 | 19 | Con +6 |
 | 3 Mar | 39 | 31 | 19 | Con +8 |
| 2 Mar | 38 | 33 | 16 | Con +5 |
| 1 Mar | 39 | 32 | 17 | Con +7 |
 | 28 Feb | 37 | 32 | 19 | Con +5 |
| 26 Feb | 37 | 35 | 17 | Con +2 |
| 26 Feb | 39 | 29 | 15 | Con +10 |
| 25 Feb | 39 | 33 | 16 | Con +6 |
| 24 Feb | 38 | 32 | 19 | Con +6 |
