The poll leads swing like a pendulum do?

Opinion polls should be treated with caution. If that aphorism needed any further emphasis it has been provided by two surveys which show starkly different results, published within two days of each other.

First, on Sunday, the Observer released its Ipsos Mori poll, which showed strong support for the Conservatives's approach to the economy and recorded a seventeen point lead for David Cameron's party.

In contrast, the Independent's ComRes poll suggests that the Tories' lead has been trimmed to nine points, with Labour up 5% since its last survey. An odd result given that Alistair Darling's Pre Budget Report was greeted, in general, with scepticism by the media.

Under the Observer's piece, Sir Robert Worcester, founder of MORI, offers something of a corrective to sensational newspaper headlines about changing poll leads.

Nine of the past 10 polls show the Conservatives at or over the 40% level, where they have been since July. Three leads were 17%, three below 10%. Not one varied in the Tory share by more than 3% from the 40% average.


It's worth noting that UK Polling Report, which is generally offers fairly circumspect analysis, is of the opinion that the ComRes version is most likely a rogue poll.

Comments

fair_deal said…
Angus Reid's polls with the big leads looks dodgier than (or as dodgy) as Com Res. Coffee House said Tory polls show a similar narrowing.

You Gov has been shown to have been the most reliable pollster in terms of correlation with actual results. It has shown a 9 and 12% lead.

The change is Labour has pulled itself from the mid 20's to high 20's (just touching 30 on a good day) narrowing the Tory lead.

There is also the problematic issue of by-election results which are also a useful indicator. They are not showing the type of shifts the Tories need to get the 10% swing they have to get (a far from easy task)
23 December 2009 at 15:19
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more