Political polling
- Thread starter brogdale
- Start date
I too am a traditional die-hard Labour voter (2015-19) who has found it sadly impossible to maintain this support since the party was hijacked by these extremists.
I intend to tweet endlessly about being politically homeless and undermine everything the party does until they dip below 25% in the polls
Jeremiah18.17
Well-Known Member
Yup, more forests will be currently being depleted as the yellow-Tories bombard households in their target council wards with “it’s a two horse race” and dodgy-bar-chart-bullshit flyers. Plus the thinnest veneer of sex/race pol focused social liberals may have been sheered away Lib Demwards by the recent Labour dogwhistling on GRT community, Law’n’ order and flagshagging. All this probably worthy a few percentage points for Yellow-Tories.
ska invita
back on the other side
what's the text from?
ska invita
back on the other side
belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
Yup, it’s the new yougov one from yesterday. And while the level of drop seems a bit big, the general movement is clear, I think.
ska invita
back on the other side
Less worried about the Labour loss more so any Tory gain
I'd be interested to know how much of that is due to former Labour supporters simply saying they wouldn't vote rather than a straight move from Lab > Tory
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Call me auld fashioned but being of working age doesn't end the day you turn 50
There's also a more fundamental point of failure with opinion polling, which is harder to get your arms around. A point of failure that is at the heart of all the difficulties that polling companies have with meaningfully predicting outcomes. It comes down to this: what actually is a poll? Because what it is not is a measurement of an objective metric. People are not reporting a fact. They are responding to an interaction, describing their subjective sense ("I feel") of how they as a distinct object (the "me") might behave under an ambiguous, unstated, contestable context. The answer can't be a meaningful statement of fact, it has to be constructed in the moment. There is a line of thought that claims the construction of the answer derives at least in part from the nature of the interaction itself, including the context within that interaction takes place. That’s why you get different answers depending on who does the asking and what order the questions are asked in. People are adopting an identity in the moment that reflects a message they believe to be necessary. This might be radically different to what they would do once in a ballot box. This problem is bad enough during a wider social discourse dominated by an imminent election. With no such discourse to frame the polling interaction, I can't see that it is possible to read across from polling to actual voting.
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I've spent too much time recently thinking about Foucault and for at least two minutes I was convinced you were making a subtle and clever pun that I couldn't quite figure out about the subjectifying processes of normalising judgements used by those with power.
And then I saw it.
maomao
普費斯
Thanks, but unlikely given my track record.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
Labour got 32% in 2019 and, from memory, 28% in 1983. That was the lowest they've got in the postwar era and, I've always assumed, just about the lowest Labour could go. That assumption was a vague feeling that the class/party link would still hold fast for a core group of voters. It's hard to know if there is a natural baseline figure for Labour anymore. We're not at pasokification yet, in part because of FPTP. But even if they remain as the second biggest party, which they will, there's a point where they become irrelevant and not a serious competitor for power.
I've noticed that the polls are diverging. I've no idea why. But bare in mind that it could be that Yougov are getting it right and everybody is else is getting it wrong. Same could be true of Survation. Do wish people wouldn't just keep posting Yougov without noting this divergence though, it's feeding U75's confirmation biases.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
It isn't really that simple - Yougov are showing a consistent large tory lead, but plenty of others are recording large tory leads too, although perhaps less consistently. Survation have recently been recording 6-10% leads. Redfield and Wilton Strategies have recorded an 11% lead and a 2% lead this month alone...
My gut reaction is that with a Tory lead as extreme and big as that (
), the only way is down.But right now, my confidence is pretty shaky about that
There's an interesting piece here (linked to in a NS piece I was just reading) with some YouGov analysis about why the tory sleaze stories of the last month or so haven't made any headway into their polling.
Amongst those who self-report paying a high level of attention to politics, our poll just two days before the local elections showed a five-point lead for Labour (38% to 33%). This was in stark contrast to the rest of our sample, which showed a 15-point lead for the Conservatives (46% to 31%), averaging out at an overall Conservative 10-point lead.
Looking at the trend over the last month, we also see two completely different stories depending on whether people are engaged in politics or not. There has been a dramatic shift amongst those with a self-reported political attention of 8/10 or higher, with the Conservatives collapsing from a 17-point lead on 13 April to a five-point Labour lead in early May. Amongst those with a political attention of 7/10 or lower, voting intention is virtually unchanged over this time.
YouGov started weighting by political attention after the 2015 general election, when we identified that our samples previously contained too many people highly engaged in politics. Without this adjustment, it is likely our polls leading up to the elections last Thursday would have presented a very different picture of where the country was, rather than our 10-point leads that correlated very closely with the local election results across England.
Amongst those who self-report paying a high level of attention to politics, our poll just two days before the local elections showed a five-point lead for Labour (38% to 33%). This was in stark contrast to the rest of our sample, which showed a 15-point lead for the Conservatives (46% to 31%), averaging out at an overall Conservative 10-point lead.
Looking at the trend over the last month, we also see two completely different stories depending on whether people are engaged in politics or not. There has been a dramatic shift amongst those with a self-reported political attention of 8/10 or higher, with the Conservatives collapsing from a 17-point lead on 13 April to a five-point Labour lead in early May. Amongst those with a political attention of 7/10 or lower, voting intention is virtually unchanged over this time.
YouGov started weighting by political attention after the 2015 general election, when we identified that our samples previously contained too many people highly engaged in politics. Without this adjustment, it is likely our polls leading up to the elections last Thursday would have presented a very different picture of where the country was, rather than our 10-point leads that correlated very closely with the local election results across England.
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