This afternoon, Michael Ashcroft addressed the Conservative Party Conference, providing a host of individual seat polls of interest to them. Of course, many of these will also be of interest to the Liberal Democrats. The polls were each of 1000 people during the July-September period. They should be noted as a snapshot of the time, and not a snapshot of next May.
Continue reading Michael Ashcroft Polling on Liberal Democrat marginals
A little while ago I wrote a blog about opinion polls and what to do with them. It highlighted how interpretation of opinion polling is often more focused on grabbing a headline than trying to actually make use of the data it has provided. It seems to be one of those blogs that I can keep on sharing, because the headlines just keep on coming.
Of course, one popular polling question is to ask the respondent who they will vote for at the next general election. From all the collected responses, people can have a stab at who might form the next government. Opinion polls are important and this regard, and the likes of Electoral Calculus, UK Polling Report and Polling Observatory all do a great job in making predicting the next government a little bit more informed, and quite frankly, a little bit more fun… Continue reading Think you can predict the next general election? What about Aberdeenshire West & Kincardine?
Opinion polls remain a key method of predicting what might happen in an election. We are grateful to newspapers and websites for continually paying for polling companies to ask roughly 1000 people how they attend to vote so that we have some idea of what might happen.
However, newspapers (understandably so) hope and expect a headline from their investment in polling. Hence, we see headlines such as ‘Support for Labour shrinks as faith in recovery grows, ICM poll finds’ from The Guardian, or ‘Tories at lowest ebb for 8 years‘ in The Sunday Times. Continue reading Opinion polls and what to do with them