And not one of the last 6 polls has OUT ahead amongst CON voters The big BREXIT polling news overnight is splashed on the front page of the Telegraph – that in its latest ORB referendum phone poll the over 65s are splitting for REMAIN. After taking out those who did not give a voting preference the 65+ group split was 54%-46%. Given that the overall poll sample size of 800 that ORB has been using for its BREXIT phone…
Don Brind with some comradely advice One Twitter user was apparently disappointed when she followed tag #LabEcon2016. She was looking for Labradors but what she got was Labour’s State of the economy conference. The organisers were delighted that the event, hosted by shadow treasurer John McDonnell and closed by party leader Jeremy Corbyn was trending second on Twitter after the Cup Final. The large and enthusiastic gathering heard Corbyn’s signature line “austerity is a political choice not a necessity” endorsed…
This should make comparison easier The election is a month today and postal votes to overseas addresses are starting to be mailed out. To coincide I’m switching my regular polling table to election mode stripping out the don’t knows and just give the figures of those who had a voting intention. Where a pollster has not provided this information I have set my spreadsheet so it calculates this itself. Showing net numbers is, after all, how general election polls a…
The Alastair Meeks Decision Tree You can access the descison tree here The EU referendum polling is all over the shop, with a stark divide between the phone polls, which show a clear Remain lead, and the online polls, which show it neck and neck with Leave perhaps fractionally ahead. How on earth are we supposed to cater for this in our betting? Here’s how. We only need to assess two things: what the current state of public opinion is…
What if the phone polls are wrong? Earlier on this year I spoke to someone who works in the polling industry, they ruefully observed that the 2015 general election opinion polls accurately predicted the Tory victory, so long as you ignored the headline voting intention figures and focussed on the supplementaries, and I’m starting to wonder if we might be seeing a similar situation with this EU referendum, where whatever the headline voting intention figure is, the supplementaries are generally…
Trying to predict the next recession has the danger making you sound like The Ancient Mariner but William Hill have a market up if the UK is going to have recession by the end of 2017 if you want to bet on the timing of it. I’m not an economist, so this piece should be viewed in that spirit. Most of the economic mood music seems to indicate backing a recession occurring before the end of 2017 might be the best…
My article for tomorrow's Observer on the #EURef polling https://t.co/yfXfgCuYiW — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 21, 2016 New Opinium online poll has IN lead getting widerIN: 44% (+2)OUT: 40% (-1) — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 21, 2016 CON voters split #EURef pollsICM phone 49-39 INICM online 45-44 INYouGov 44-44Ipsos MORI 60-34 INComRes 48-46 INOpinium 48-41 IN — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 21, 2016 If it stays this way it could be decisive The general view until this last week has…
The postal ballots go out next week Anything upto a quarter of the votes cast in the referendum will be by post and the time-table stipulated by the Electoral Commission states that ballot packs to postal voters should start to go out on Monday. Initially those who currently live overseas will be mailed but the plan is that UK-based postal voters will start getting their ballots by the weekend. Given that we know from past elections that most postal voters…