At least we know the pollsters aren’t “herding”

Above is the Wikipedia table of the latest voting intention polls and as can be seen there is a huge variation between the polls. In fact the gap when looking at them from the CON lead perspective is as great as anything I have seen since establishing PB in March 2004.

What is not included in the list is the regular monitor from Ipsos-MORI – the one firm that still carries much of its political polling online and, of course, the one that has been carrying out UK political polling for nearly half a century. It was the firm that in 2014 after the Scottish Indyref picked up the first big switch to the SNP which, of course, has been a major factor in Labour’s decline.

My first reaction is that the latest YouGov is possibly an outlier and we should always recognise that statistically, we are going to see such surveys. In fact the US polling expert Nate Silver used to argue that the pollsters that never produced outliers are the ones that you should regard with the most caution.

Undoubtedly there has been a move away from LAB since the May 6th local but measuring the scale can be tricky.

So it the YouGov 18% lead an outlier? Only time will tell but if it isn’t then Labour is in real trouble.