Will this make life easier for Gordon or not?

There’s news this morning of a big polling development, the first product of which is seen in the panel above – the YouGov/Sky News daily tracker for the party conference season.

This shows day by day how opinion changed during the last week and how the “conference effect” seems to decline as the news agenda moves on.

This is unlike normal tracker polls which have generally involved only 250 fresh interviews each day, with “daily” data reflecting four days of research. Here the firm is polling a fresh sample of 1000 adults online every weekday throughout Great Britain. Thus the pollster’s surveys for Sky will provide a completely fresh and up-to-date report of daily shifts in the public mood.

I think that this is a very welcome development and I particularly like the fresh sample each day approach.

On top of this, YouGov will be surveying viewers’ responses to the keynote speeches of Gordon Brown and David Cameron, reporting findings on Sky within two hours of the end of each speech.

All if this, I believe, will show the impact of media coverage on the polling number and will enable us to put it more into context. As I repeatedly say – conference season polls are not generally the best guide to what will happen in the election.

Mike Smithson