Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Massive Populus constituency polling underway - could it be Ashcroft III?

Several people have either emailed or left comments over the last couple of days to say that they've been interviewed by Populus via telephone.  It appears to be constituency polling, because the call is aborted if the interviewee turns out to be in the wrong constituency.  So far I've heard about nine seats -

Ross, Skye and Lochaber
Edinburgh North and Leith
Edinburgh South
East Dunbartonshire
Glasgow South-West
Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale
Fife North-East
Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk
East Renfrewshire

From the questions that were recalled, it initially sounded like internal polling for one of the London parties, but there's no discernible pattern in the above list - other than the SNP, no party is in contention in all nine.  Another possible explanation is that it's a third round of Ashcroft constituency polls - he's already polled four of the nine seats on the list, but it could be that he's revisiting them to see if there's been any change (he's done that in a number of English constituencies).  Time will tell.

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On the previous thread, David Halliday pointed me in the direction of an article on Common Space about the current polling situation, which makes several misleading points.  In particular, it's stated that -

"In Monday's TNS Poll (TNS does face to face interviews) the headline figure for the SNP was 52 per cent but the actual raw figure before weighting was 29 per cent. The number of undecided in the TNS poll was 29 per cent - obviously these numbers are in stark contrast to what is being portrayed in the media...How the polling companies weight their polls is giving a huge boost to the SNP numbers..."

The reality is that the SNP haven't benefited at all from the weightings TNS have applied.  In respect of the headline numbers, there were 217 SNP voters before weighting, and 219 SNP voters after weighting - near-enough identical.  What is really meant by "actual raw figure before weighting" is "actual figure after weighting but before undecided respondents have been stripped out", which is an entirely different point.  Because there is such a large number of undecideds in this poll (hardly untypical for TNS), the SNP vote is of course much higher after those respondents are removed, but so is the Labour vote, the Tory vote and the Lib Dem vote.

It seems to me the average reader will be left with the highly misleading impression that all of the polling firms are using some kind of very weird weighting scheme which is uniformly flattering the SNP by a massive amount.  Nothing of the sort is happening.  YouGov's weighting tends to boost the SNP a little, but not dramatically.

The underlying message of the article is "there is no room for complacency", which I would thoroughly endorse, but I think it's possible to get that message across without making bogus points about how the SNP's position in the polls is supposedly much worse if you "drill down".   It isn't.  The SNP's position in the polls is absolutely fantastic.  If they don't win a truck-load of seats, it'll be for one (or more) of three reasons - a) a significant late swing back to Labour, b) industrial-scale tactical voting, or c) methodological flaws across the whole polling industry of the sort we saw in 1992.

On the latter point, it was mentioned on the previous thread that the SNP were significantly overestimated in the polls in the run-up to the European elections last year.  That's true, but all of the firms in question (Survation, YouGov, Panelbase and ICM) have changed their methodology since then, and introduced weighting by recalled referendum vote.  So there's no reason to assume that history is bound to repeat itself.

28 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. I think part of the issue with the euros was low turnout which disproportionately affected the snp. Part of this will be down to activists focusing on campaigning for the referendum rather than GOTV for the euros. (True for me personally at least) This *should* be less of a problem in May.

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  3. Add Fife North East to your list. My wife answered the phone to Populus on Monday, and was turned down because she was over 41. Then they called back on Tuesday, I answered and they were happy to go ahead even though I am also over 41.

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    1. Ah, I forgot about Fife NE - somebody mentioned that the other day as well. Thanks, I've updated the post.

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    2. 2612 - quotas are enforced and relaxed depending on what point in fieldwork a poll is at. It's to avoid a situation (which almost always is an issue) where you're looking only for 16-24 year olds for a long period at the end because they're the toughest age group to get. I used to work at Ipsos MORI's call centre in Edinburgh.

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  4. My wife got a call from Populus this morning and they were happy to get her answers even though she's a bluddy foreigner and cannae vote (she told them). We're in Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk.

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  5. I was called ....they are interested in east dunbartonshire to ( Jo swinson)

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  6. Interesting polling there esp NE Fife and Ross, Skye and Lochaber.

    Just looking at the polling ;

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2015_United_Kingdom_general_election#2015

    I imagine we'll have a Record/Survation one on the way soon? Maybe in time for Friday? That's me just guessing.

    A few others if done on a by-monthly basis etc will miss the election deadline, so I'm expcting a few late April early May as well.

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  7. Received a call on Monday. I'm in Edinburgh South.

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    1. Updated again - the list is now twice as long as it was at the start!

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  8. My gut says this could be internal SNP polling. Each of the seats mentioned is either touch-and-go for the SNP, or it looks like they might be in with a shout from a long way behind (Berwickshire). I have my doubts that Ashcroft would be re-polling R,S&L and D,C&T so soon after his polls were published last month.

    Either, the SNP could be double-checking Ashcroft's polling in the seats previously polled and testing the waters in some other key seats, or they could be following up on positive canvass returns to check their accuracies.

    If so, these polls will probably never see the light of day, but if they did, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Glenrothes poll in the mix to check if the results of Ashcroft's Kirkcaldy poll are consistent throughout Labour-held Fife.

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    1. Yeah, it could be either the SNP private polling or Ashcroft again. Would he not have said though?

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  10. I have just been polled by Populus too. I am in the interesting constituency of East Renfrewshire.

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  11. It is not Ashcroft, the Scottish election no longer matters the seats are going into Ed's column regardless. There is no chance he is spending money here when he could be polling E&W marginal

    It will be a party, my guess is the SNP

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    1. From the way the questions were described, I'm struggling to see how it can possibly be the SNP - it was a UK-centric poll. In my opinion Ashcroft is the most likely explanation, but even if it isn't him, I'd be very surprised if we don't see some more Scottish constituency polling from him before election day.

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  12. I found out this evening that our local SNP councillor was also polled by Populus yesterday or the day before. He described a caller with an Indian sort of accent (my neighbour got someone with a Geordie accent), and telling him firmly that hell would freeze over before he would ever vote for UKIP. So that's two people in DC&T we know about. In fact, it's two people in Tweeddale West ward.

    They must be polling a hell of a lot of people from the sound of what we're hearing. To get two SNP activists in one council ward.

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  13. I got called early this evening. I was told it was "about the general election." However, they guy had an overseas accent, and we get so many junk calls from abroad (about 4 a day) that I automatically gave my standard answer, "Sorry, we don't take cold calls" and hung up. It does make me wonder if the accent of the interviewer might introduce sampling bias. The last time I was called by a polling company it was a woman with a Scottish accent. As that is not how junk calls usually come in, I took the call and answered her questions (this was just before the Referendum). We may be unusual in the number of junk calls we get. It's because my contact details are openly on the web, and they ignore the telephone preference service registration. Indeed, we are at the point of wondering whether to give up our landline because cold calls have become such a constant nuisance. This must affect polling sampling, I'd have thought.

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. Ps - just seen the comment just in from Rolfe. Yes, my caller had what sounded like an Indian accent too. As that's the accent of the majority of junk calls, that's why I foreclosed. Also, I should have added that we live in the Drumoyne area of Govan.

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    3. The councillor said he usually hangs up on cold callers, but that this one approached him in such a way that he took the call.

      I agree with you, I was called by Ipsos Mori some months ago and the caller had a pleasant, educated sort of mid-Scotland accent. He also managed to get past my knee-jerk slamming down of the phone on cold callers.

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  14. The call I took a while back had the same kind of "pleasant, educated sort of mid-Scotland" accent - a woman. What bothers me about it is that these junk calls poison us into making stereotyped assumptions about incoming calls - stereotypes based on ethnicity and class - but sadly, because such profiles reflect many of the people in the world who end up working in junk calling centres. I cannot understand why government bows to powerful lobbies that allow these calls to continue. Because I'm into green energy, I get about 1 call every day from an English woman's voice that tries to sell me Green Deal stuff. I wrote to Humza about it. He passed it on to Fergus, whose reply didn't help. I'd have thought the answer would be to rule it illegal in Scotland to cold sell a product, so you can get at the vendors, not the call centres. However, that's probably a telecommunications issue and a reserved issue. If the SNP do end up as the back seat drivers of the UK parliament, legislation on this question could make them very popular - and remove a source of sampling bias for the genuine polls!

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  15. A lady called me this morning, simply to ask if I'd received a leaflet about a local wind farm. I think I did get the leaflet, although I binned it as I'm in favour of wind farms and don't feel particularly nimby-ish about them. I just told her I seemed to recall receiving such a leaflet. She sounded local, and I think she was checking up that her leaflets had genuinely been delivered. She got past my cold-caller filter too.

    I know one of our local SNP organisers said she once had trouble with "volunteers" who were too lazy to deliver the actual leaflets they had offered to take care of. She just phoned people she knew on the routes though - she didn't call at random.

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  16. Thanks for taking the time to respond, James. I couldn't see that the article was talking about anything other than the undecideds but as that applies to everyone (even if potentially more to one party than another) and has nothing to do with weighting I couldn't make sense of it.

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  17. Last night I had a call from Ip-Mori Was asked if anyone was aged 18-24- No. What age was I Too old, wanted people under 50 Asian sounding female

    10mins later call from Ip-Mori would I answer some questions and what age was I? Again told too old wanted people under 50 Different Asian sounding female Pnone no from Edinburgh

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    1. Forgot to say Kilmarnock and Loudoun

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  18. Called today by Populus doing Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk. Questions matched Ashcroft surveys

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