Measuring the impact of the Sun’s switch?
What will today’s news do to YouGov’s daily tracker?
In trying to assess the political influence of the Sun’s switch Labour MP, Nick Palmer, made this astute comment on the previous thread:-
“..It occurs to me that the daily YouGovs are going to give us an excellent opportunity to test the power of the Sun endorsement to shift things. The YouGov taken today and reported tomorrow will show the impact of the speech plus a little bit of Sun. The one taken tomorrow and reported on Thursday will show the full impact of the Sun’s endorsement, probably magnified a bit by whatever effect the speech had starting to wear off…”
So to put this into context I dug out the above from an earlier poll from the firm this month where the firm’s newspaper weighting data appeared.
As I’ve pointed out here before YouGov tends to have far fewer Sun/Star readers in its samples compared to the population as a whole and generally they are weighted upwards. Thus in the poll example above 299 of the 2009 people who took are identified as Sun/Star readers but that is increased to 442 after the weighting has been applied. Thus YouGov assumes that 22-23% of the electorate are Sun/Star readers.
Given their respective circulations my guess is that just under a fifth of the weighted sample of YouGov polls are Sun readers.
Will they be influenced by today’s front page? We’ll have to see.