Is this good news for the Lib Dems? In the next day or so Populus will be publishing the full detail of its latest Times poll and will be following ICM and now Communicate Research in showing how respondents answered based on what they told the interviewer they did at the 2005 general election. This is great news – for as anybody who has done anything more than the most basic campaigning knows the most important electors are those that…
And bleak news for the Lib Dems from Populus and CR There are still lots of smiling Gordons to illustrate our main article this morning but not quite on the same scale as recent polls have suggested. The surveys are from two pollsters who have hardly figured as successive YouGov and ICM polls have reported big leads for Labour in the past three weeks. Populus in the Times has with comparisons on its last poll at the start of the…
Can Gordon risk his poll leads falling off? Whenever the subject of an early election, perhaps as soon as October, is mentioned people dismiss the idea because of Gordon’s character. The man, they argue, is not a risk taker and why should he chance everything on an early poll. Fine. But is waiting the risky strategy? As we’ve seen with Cameron and the Tories the opinion polls can move very fast and the longer an election is delayed the greater…
Should the Guardian’s pollster have followed the Mori approach? Reproduced above is the detailed finding from the Guardian’s ICM poll that was played big by the paper yesterday and which has sent shock waves throughout the Tory party. It also has been covered extensively in other parts of the media and was the main reason why William Hill opened its “next Tory leader” market. Yet looking at the options that were put respondents were not offered the chance in both…
How long can we expect the polling bounce to last? The above table, adapted from UK Polling Report, shows what happened to the polls when John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher in November 1990 – the last time a Prime Minister was replaced mid-term. With all the talk of a general election in the air a critical issue will, surely, be the expected length of Gordon’s poll bounce. Clearly new or different faces and a new approach had a very marked…
Polling analysis: How the votes are churning At the end of last year ICM started a new feature in its tables – special sub-sets linking the answers to each question to what those interviewed told the pollster that they did at the last general election. This is usually made available in the detailed data tables that are posted on the pollster’s website a few days after the main findings are published. Communicate Research now includes a similar information and we…
But why’s there so much turbulence amongst LD supporters? This is the updated version of a chart that is featured often here – how declared LD supporters respond to YouGov’s question of whether they would prefer a Brown-led Labour government or a Cameron-led Tory one? This is asked every month of all voters but the chart just focuses on the Lib Dems. Those surveyed are not given any other option and the results are probably a good pointer to potential…
What will the gap settle down at? One of the things you should never do is compare a survey from one pollster with one from another pollster and then try to suggest that there is some trend. Each of the surveys carried out by the five main UK firms use different approaches so that concluding that there has been movement when one from one survey from one firm is different from another from a different firm is simply not valid….