Friday, May 30, 2014

An intriguing straw in the wind from YouGov

Because of the Bank Holiday we've only had three YouGov daily polls of GB-wide Westminster voting intention this week, but the Scottish subsamples from two of them have shown the SNP in the lead, and the other one had a relatively narrow Labour lead.  Here are today's figures -

SNP 34%
Labour 31%
Conservatives 16%
Liberal Democrats 7%
Greens 6%
UKIP 6%

This could still be a fluke caused by sampling variation, but YouGov's methodology for GB-wide polls is so unfavourable for the SNP that it's extremely unusual for them to be in the lead in two subsamples in the space of three days.  With anecdotal reports of an increased number of people coming forward to help the Yes campaign as a direct result of UKIP's success south of the border, this could be one worth watching.

It seems, however, that I may have spoken too soon about the limited effect of UKIP's surge on the GB-wide headline numbers.  Today's poll has the highest Labour lead in a couple of months (albeit only by 1%), which will have been partly caused by Tory voters switching to UKIP, who are up to an unusually high 16%.  What happens from here may depend on whether the Tories can hold off the UKIP challenge in next week's parliamentary by-election in Newark.

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Something very peculiar has happened to the BBC referendum poll tracker since I posted about it yesterday.  They seem to have removed the first of the two Panelbase polls conducted for the Sunday Times this year, meaning that they're now acknowledging the existence of only ONE out of SIX Panelbase referendum polls to have been conducted in 2014 so far!

2 comments:

  1. Interesting how UKIP support in Scotland is considerably greater amongst men than women. Men were 10% for UKIP in polls ahead of the EU but women only 4%. That's a huge difference.

    Women considerably more in favour of the EU, ECHR and have less issues with immigration etc.

    Of course they're more reticent about indy.

    Maybe will be less so now that Farage is going to save the union?

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  2. Another straw in the wind; Sunday's Yougov with Lab just 3 points ahead of the SNP in the Scottish sample.

    This continues and SNP will go ahead of Labour here around the middle of the year.

    Given this is Yougov where SNP respondents are heavily down-weighted, this must be worrying for Labour.

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