SNP lead the Tories by more than 20% in latest subsample average

Someone working with the media asked for an update of the Scottish subsample average, so as I did the calculation anyway, I may as well share it here...

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

SNP 45.0% (-1.6)
Conservatives 24.0% (-6.1)
Labour 22.2% (+7.3)
Liberal Democrats 7.4% (+3.1)

Before anyone gets too excited, this average is based on just five subsamples, and is heavily skewed by the Kantar/TNS results, which are wildly out of line with everything else.  Without Kantar, the SNP would be lower and the Tories would be higher.  Nevertheless, it does look very much like Labour have genuinely made a modest recovery - their vote share is pretty consistent across the subsamples.  That opens up some intriguing possibilities - if, for example, the GB-wide swing from Tory to Labour has been replicated in Scotland without the SNP taking a significant hit, it might help the SNP in several constituencies (although obviously if Labour recover too much, the SNP might start losing seats in former Labour heartland areas).

SNP lead by more than 16% in latest subsample average

The run of exceptionally good subsample results for the SNP was finally broken today when Ipsos-Mori actually put the Tories ahead of the SNP.  That hasn't happened previously in this campaign, but it's a somewhat artificial finding because the SNP were slightly ahead (and on a very healthy 45% of the vote) before the turnout filter was applied.  As ever, individual subsamples are prone to huge error and should be treated with extreme caution, but an aggregate of several subsamples might conceivably tell you something interesting.  Here is what the average of results over the last seven days shows...

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

SNP 46.6% (+0.2)
Conservatives 30.1% (+2.1)
Labour 14.9% (+0.3)
Liberal Democrats 4.3% (-2.2)

I had a bit of a dilemma with this update, because Kantar/TNS provide partial information about their Scottish subsample, but don't reveal what the turnout-weighted figures are.  I decided to take the view that you just have to go with the information that's actually available, so this update is based on subsamples from seven polls - two from YouGov, one from Ipsos-Mori, one from Kantar/TNS, one from Survation, one from Panelbase and one from ICM.  The GfK subsample published today (which shows an enormous lead for the SNP) is excluded because the fieldwork began more than seven days ago.

A few people mentioned being interviewed by YouGov the other day for what seemed to be a Scotland-specific poll, so if it's intended for public consumption, we may not have to read the runes from subsamples for much longer.

Latest subsample average suggests SNP have a huge 18% lead over the Tories

We may simply have had a run of good results by complete chance, but it has to be said that the last week of Scottish subsamples has made for considerably pleasanter reading as far as the SNP are concerned.  There hasn't been even a single one in which they've slipped below the 40% mark, which certainly wasn't the case earlier in the campaign.  Their best showing was 56% in a Panelbase subsample released today, and there have also been four others in the high 40s.  The obvious hope is that the media hype over the Tory gains in the local elections has backfired, and that anti-Tory voters are now coalescing behind the SNP.

The following subsample average is based on eight polls - two YouGov, one Survation, one ComRes, one ICM, one Opinium, one ORB and one Panelbase.

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

SNP 46.4% (+3.6)
Conservatives 28.0% (-2.3)
Labour 14.6% (-0.4)
Liberal Democrats 6.5% (-1.0)

(The Poll of Polls for Westminster voting intentions uses the Scottish subsamples from all GB-wide polls that have been conducted entirely within the last seven days and for which datasets have been provided, and also all full-scale Scottish polls that have been conducted at least partly within the last seven days. Full-scale polls are given ten times the weighting of subsamples.)

Subsample average fails to find any post-locals momentum for the Scottish Tories

Well, the "remarkable" poll in the Sunday Times did turn out to be an anti-climax, not for either of the reasons I speculated last night, but simply because it was a poll that had already been published and that we already knew about!  It was a GB-wide Ashcroft poll, but the Sunday Times are reading huge significance into the results of the Scottish subsample, because "far more" Scottish respondents were interviewed than for a standard full-scale Scottish poll.  That gives the entirely misleading impression that the results are more accurate than a full-scale Scottish poll, whereas in fact a properly weighted poll of 1000 people should be more accurate than an unweighted subsample of 3,500.  In any case, even a weighted poll of 3,500 wouldn't be dramatically more accurate than a poll of 1000.

Even if you take them seriously, the Ashcroft numbers are already a couple of weeks out of date (they precede the local elections) and don't show anything radically different from what we've seen in the campaign so far.  The SNP's lead is 11% - exactly the same as in the full-scale Panelbase poll.

So we still await the first Scottish poll since the local elections, and in the meantime all we can do is look at an average of the very small number of Scottish subsamples conducted over the last seven days, which suggests there hasn't been any further momentum for the Tories.

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

SNP 42.8% (-2.2)
Conservatives 30.3% (-1.2)
Labour 15.0% (-0.8)
Liberal Democrats 7.5% (+2.7)

(The Poll of Polls for Westminster voting intentions uses the Scottish subsamples from all GB-wide polls that have been conducted entirely within the last seven days and for which datasets have been provided, and also all full-scale Scottish polls that have been conducted at least partly within the last seven days. Full-scale polls are given ten times the weighting of subsamples.)

Subsample average puts SNP on 45%

You may have heard a rumour today that Panelbase's latest Scottish subsample puts the Conservatives in the lead, but that's not actually true.  On the headline figures excluding Don't Knows, the SNP and the Tories are tied at 42% apiece. That's sobering enough, but to put things in perspective, a Survation telephone subsample yesterday put the SNP ahead of the Tories by more than 30 points.  Even if they were properly weighted (which they're not), individual subsamples have such a huge margin of error that both of those results are perfectly consistent with what we've seen in the full-scale Scottish polls during this campaign, ie. an SNP lead over the Tories of between 11% and 15%.  The slight cause for concern, though, is that Panelbase's fieldwork finished much later, and there's a theoretical possibility that it was picking up genuine momentum for the Scottish Tories brought about by the reporting (or misreporting) of the local elections.  All we can do is wait and see.  The next straw in the wind will be a YouGov subsample released in the morning.  In the meantime, here is what an average of subsamples over the last seven days looks like...

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

SNP 45.0% (+2.2)
Conservatives 31.5% (+2.2)
Labour 15.8% (-0.7)
Liberal Democrats 4.8% (-2.2)

(The Poll of Polls for Westminster voting intentions uses the Scottish subsamples from all GB-wide polls that have been conducted entirely within the last seven days and for which datasets have been provided, and also all full-scale Scottish polls that have been conducted at least partly within the last seven days. Full-scale polls are given ten times the weighting of subsamples.)

Support for independence stands at 47% in new Poll of Polls

An otherwise surprisingly fair piece in the Economist about the prospects for Scottish independence is slightly tarnished at the start with a statement about the current polling situation which is flatly untrue - in fact, it's basically the polar opposite of the truth.  We're told that "opinion polls now put support for a 'Scoxit' from the United Kingdom at or below the 45% achieved when the question was formally put in 2014".  Rubbish.  Every single opinion poll that has asked about independence since the EU referendum has put the Yes vote above 45%.  The lowest figure has been 46% (albeit admittedly the most common figure is only a little higher, at 47%).  Even if you include the dodgy BMG poll, which was misrepresented in much of the media as an "independence poll" when it clearly wasn't, the lowest figure would be 45%.  It is literally impossible to find a poll that can even be misrepresented as showing that Yes support has fallen since September 2014.  Even at a stretch, then, the most that the Economist are entitled to say is that "opinion polls now put support for 'Scoxit' from the UK at or above the 45% achieved in 2014".

So how did the word "below" get into the article in the first place? The most likely - and disturbing - answer is that the author didn't even bother to check the numbers, and just assumed that the narrative being pushed by the right-wing London press must have some vague basis in reality.  Always a schoolboy error, that.  Perhaps the time has come to challenge the misinformation with an update of this blog's Poll of Polls.

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Should Scotland be an independent country?

Yes 47.0% (-3.8)
No 53.0% (+3.8)

The reason for the drop in the Yes vote is that the last update was way back in late July, and all but one of the four polls taken into account at that point had been conducted in the days immediately after the EU referendum, when there appeared to be a sharp pro-Yes swing which later receded.  But as you can see, Yes support remains 2.3% higher than its September 2014 level.   Given that most firms now weight by recalled indyref vote, we can be pretty confident that's a genuine increase in support.

The methodology for the Poll of Polls remains exactly the same as before - only the most recent poll from each firm is included, and if a firm hasn't reported for more than three months, they are left out altogether.  Therefore, the five polls taken into account on this occasion are YouGov from late August (Yes 46%, No 54%), TNS from August/early September (Yes 47%, No 53%), Survation from early September (Yes 47%, No 53%), Ipsos-Mori from early September (Yes 48%, No 52%) and Panelbase from mid-September (Yes 47%, No 53%).

Needless to say, the dodgy poll from BMG has been excluded, because contrary to the bogus claims that were made about it (including disgracefully by the firm themselves), it simply didn't ask a question about independence.  It instead asked whether Scotland should "remain a member (sic) of the United Kingdom" or "leave the United Kingdom".  For the avoidance of doubt, "leaving the United Kingdom" can in no sense be regarded as a proxy form of words for "independence".  There are several potential outcomes to leaving the UK, of which independence is only one.  Here are some others -

1) Becoming a self-governing dependency of the UK.  (Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man are all in this position - they are all outside the UK, and indeed outside the EU.)

2) Entering into a free association agreement with the UK.   (This is a form of 'sovereign non-independence'.  The best-known example is perhaps the Cook Islands' relationship with New Zealand.   When the Cook Islands were formally decolonised, they freely agreed to allow New Zealand to continue to make decisions for them on foreign affairs and defence.)

3) Becoming part of another existing sovereign state.  (An example of this is the decision of northern Schleswig, by referendum in 1920, to leave Germany and become part of Denmark.)

Without specifying what Scotland would be leaving the UK to do, the BMG question was utterly meaningless.  I hope we're not going to see any more of that kind of nonsense - and if by any chance we do, I certainly hope that reputable sites like What Scotland Thinks will stop joining in with the pretence that we are somehow dealing with genuine polls on independence.

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NOTE : I've had to make a small adjustment to the numbers originally mentioned in this post.  Ironically that's because, for quick reference, I had used the What Scotland Thinks list of polls, which I've since realised contains a little error.

Leave edge into the lead in new Survey Monkey poll

Hot on the heels of YouGov, we now have more apparent evidence that the tragic murder of Jo Cox has not affected public opinion on the EU referendum.  Today's new Survey Monkey poll was conducted entirely after the tragedy, and although the one-point increase in the Leave vote isn't statistically significant, there's certainly no sign of the swing back to Remain that many people seemed to be accepting as an established fact yesterday.

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? (Survey Monkey, 17th-20th June)

Remain 48% (n/c)

Leave 49% (+1)

Like YouGov, this is an online poll, so there remains the possibility that phone polls will detect a pro-Remain swing that online firms can't.  The Survation poll at the weekend (which so far is the only phone poll to be entirely conducted after Ms Cox's death) showed changes that were consistent with that theory, but they were also perfectly consistent with a normal reversion to the mean after an unusually good poll for Leave last time around.  The next phone poll (which I gather is expected to be another Survation poll in a matter of minutes from now) could tell us quite a lot.

UPDATE : And right on cue, here is the Survation phone poll -

Remain 45% (n/c)
Leave 44% (+2)

Again, the improvement for Leave is not statistically significant, but we now have reasonably compelling evidence from a series of polls (including both online and phone polls) that there has not been a substantial drift towards Remain in recent days.  So the Leave campaign are entitled to breathe an enormous sigh of relief - although opinions differ on whether their current position is strong enough to withstand what may be coming their way over the next 48 hours, I don't see how anyone can seriously deny that they are very much still in the game.

One detail from the Survation poll that will be of some concern to the Remain campaign is that undecided voters don't break for Remain when pressed - they're essentially split down the middle.  YouGov last night did find that the undecideds were slightly more inclined towards Remain, but even if those people had been added into the headline figures, Leave would still have had a very slender advantage.

We've heard a lot about the similarities between this referendum and the indyref, but given the closeness of the race it's worth reminding ourselves of one of the crucial differences.  In September 2014, it always seemed likely that any sort of differential turnout was going to favour the No campaign.  They were doing better among both older voters and affluent voters - two demographics that are disproportionately likely to drag themselves to the polling station.  This time it's a much more mixed picture - older voters have consistently shown themselves to be far more likely to vote Leave, while the affluent are backing Remain.  Those factors may cancel each other out, although if anything the rumours about how the postal voting is going suggest it's conceivable that Leave could even enjoy a net benefit from differential turnout.  So certain commentators may be barking up the wrong tree when they point to the divergence between the final indyref polls and the actual result, and suggest that the current polls are bound to be underestimating Remain for that reason.

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SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 45.5% (+0.1)
Leave 45.8% (n/c)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 44.1% (+0.6)
Leave 46.1% (+0.4)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 46.8% (-0.4)
Leave 45.5% (-0.3)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last seven days. The online average is based on seven polls - three from YouGov, two from Survey Monkey, one from Opinium and one from BMG. The telephone average is based on six polls - three from Survation, one from ORB, one from BMG and one from Ipsos-Mori.)

Leave back in the lead in stunning YouGov upset

This is a suitably surprising end to a bizarre day.  In the morning and early afternoon, the markets (of both the betting and financial varieties) were pointing heavily towards Remain, which led to some suspicions that there might be inside knowledge of forthcoming poll numbers.  Those suspicions seemed to have been borne out when Ben Page of Ipsos-Mori eccentrically revealed on Twitter that two of his firm's competitors were about to release polls putting Remain in the lead.  We knew that YouGov and ORB polls were pending, so those seemed like the most obvious candidates - which suggested a very real chance that a third successive YouGov poll might show a swing to Remain, and perhaps vindicate the over-excitable commentators who have been "calling" the referendum for Remain on the basis of seemingly no evidence whatever.  But as it turns out, one of the Remain leads was in fact a NatCen survey that took place over an extended four-week period, and that therefore tells us absolutely nothing about very recent trends.  Against all expectations, the new YouGov poll actually puts Leave back in the lead -

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

Remain 42% (-2)
Leave 44% (+1)

The fieldwork was apparently conducted between Friday and Sunday, so was entirely after the murder of Jo Cox.  The YouGov poll immediately before the tragedy had an identical result to this one, so on the face of it there doesn't appear to have been any direct and lasting impact on public opinion.  (If there has been an impact, it's being masked by the quirks of sampling variation.)

The other half of what we were expecting to happen did happen - the ORB phone poll put Remain in the lead, but there's some pretty good news to be found for Leave even there.  As I've mentioned a number of times, the ORB phone series has been driving me mad because there don't seem to be any definitive 'headline figures' - the Telegraph (who commission the polls) headline the figures that exclude anyone who isn't absolutely certain to vote, while ORB themselves usually seem to prefer the unfiltered numbers.  On the latter count, the Remain lead has actually fallen from 5% to 2% over the last week, leaving us firmly in 'statistical tie' territory -

Remain 49% (n/c)
Leave 47% (+3)

Remarkably, that's the second-best showing for Leave in the unfiltered sample of any ORB phone poll since the series started in March.  (And in retrospect, the outright best showing for them looks like it was a fluke result, because no other phone pollster was reporting similar numbers at the time.)

Curiously, though, the turnout-filtered figures (which until now have generally been better for Leave) shoot off in completely the opposite direction -

Remain 53% (+5)
Leave 46% (-3)

As I always used to point out about TNS polls during the indyref, the trend shown by turnout-filtered figures tends to be much more volatile, because significantly fewer respondents are left after the filter is applied.  So it's very hard to say whether this poll is picking up that Remain supporters have genuinely become much more likely to vote over the last week, or whether the greater margin of error in the filtered numbers is causing an illusory Remain boost.  For what it's worth, YouGov have failed to detect any sudden reversal of the enthusiasm gap - their poll continues to suggest that Leave voters are more likely to be absolutely certain to vote.

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SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

As a final adjustment to the time-frame covered by the Poll of Polls, from now on only polls that were at least partly conducted within the last seven days will be taken into account.  As I mentioned last week, I've made an executive decision that ORB's turnout-filtered numbers will be used for the rest of the campaign - in the last update that was boosting Leave slightly, but now it's helping Remain.

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 45.4% (+0.8)
Leave 45.8% (-0.8)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 43.5% (+1.2)
Leave 45.7% (+0.3)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 47.2% (+0.4)
Leave 45.8% (-2.0)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last seven days. The online average is based on six polls - three from YouGov, one from Opinium, one from Survey Monkey and one from BMG. The telephone average is based on five polls - two from Survation, one from ORB, one from BMG and one from Ipsos-Mori.)

Britain could be on the brink of leaving the EU, as ICM online AND phone polls give Leave a decent lead

Until now, it's been possible to believe that the apparent spectacle of phone polls moving sharply in favour of Leave was illusory.  There had only been a handful of phone polls over the last two-and-a-bit weeks - an ICM poll which put Leave in the lead, and which many people thought might be a rogue because it was conducted over a Bank Holiday, and two ORB polls which showed a narrow Remain lead on the headline numbers, but which still had very substantial 'underlying' Remain leads among the whole sample.  But most of the reassurance for Remain has just been dramatically stripped away with the publication of a new ICM phone poll that shows the Leave lead growing still further.  There's no Bank Holiday get-out clause this time, so the new poll essentially corroborates the previous one from the same firm.  Even taking into account the margin of error, two consecutive polls showing a small Leave lead make it very unlikely that Remain are currently ahead (if ICM's phone methodology is basically sound, that is).

As was the case two weeks ago, ICM conducted a simultaneous online poll, and found that the previous huge divergence between online and phone polling has vanished into thin air.

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

Telephone poll :

Remain 45% (+3)

Leave 50% (+5)

Online poll :

Remain 44% (n/c)

Leave 49% (+2)

As always in Britain-wide polls, the Scottish subsamples are tiny and unreliable.  But for what it's worth, the phone subsample puts Remain ahead by 54% to 44%, and the online subsample puts Remain ahead by 54% to 39%.  So as of this moment, we appear to be on course for the UK Leave / Scottish Remain 'doomsday scenario' that is thought could trigger an early second independence referendum.

When we see polls like these, it's worth taking a step back and recalling that the referendum is already well underway - a substantial minority of people have already voted by post, and in some cases they did so quite some time ago.  So if ICM are right, Remain are in a bit of a pickle here, because some of the result is already set in stone.  Pro-Europeans will be banking on a late swing back towards the status quo, which does often happen in referendums (although if it does occur, there's no guarantee it'll be on any great scale), and possibly on ICM proving to be less accurate than other firms.  It's perfectly possible, for example, that the next Ipsos-Mori phone poll will still show some kind of Remain lead, because so far Ipsos-Mori have tended to be more Remain-friendly than other phone firms.  But there again, Ipsos-Mori reported an enormous swing towards Yes as they converged with other firms at the end of the indyref campaign, so absolutely nothing can be taken for granted at this stage.

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SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Today's new update of the Poll of Polls marks the first time Leave have been ahead on all three averages.  However, the telephone average is based on just two polls, so should be treated with a bit of caution.

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 44.8% (-0.2)
Leave 46.9% (+1.4)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 43.0% (+0.1)
Leave 45.3% (+0.4)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 46.5% (-0.5)
Leave 48.5% (+2.5)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last two weeks. The online average is based on ten polls - four from YouGov, three from ICM, two from Opinium and one from ORB. The telephone average is based on two polls - one from ORB and one from ICM.)

Illusion of commanding Remain lead shattered by latest ORB telephone poll

As I've been pointing out over the last week or so, the media narrative insisting that Remain have made significant progress in the latest opinion polls is based on very shaky ground.  The majority of recent polls have in fact shown either a relatively static picture or an improvement for Leave, so to buy into the 'Remain surge' theory you would have to accord special significance to three polls in particular - the ORB and Ipsos-Mori telephone polls showing a big swing to Remain, and the Opinium online poll showing a more modest pro-Remain swing.  Well, one-third of that body of evidence has effectively just been scrubbed out, because the new ORB phone poll shows the Remain gains from the previous poll being reversed.

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?  (Definite voters only)

Remain 51% (-4)

Leave 46% (+4)

The Telegraph - who commissioned the poll - are of course spinning a yarn about how this apparently dramatic change in opinion came about (they're attributing it to new concerns over immigration).  But given that the last ORB poll was totally out of kilter with most other polling evidence, I think it's more likely that we're just seeing a particularly extreme example of sampling variation, after a skew towards Remain in last week's sample led everyone astray.  That would mean either that nothing much has changed, or that the swing to Leave is being greatly exaggerated by the direct comparison between the two polls.

Annoyingly, there still doesn't seem to be any definitive answer as to what constitutes the 'headline numbers' in an ORB phone poll.  The Telegraph favour the turnout-filtered figures given above, but ORB themselves and the John Curtice site give the nod to the unfiltered numbers.  For the first time, the Telegraph haven't even bothered to tell us what the unfiltered numbers are, so we'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out how much better they are for Remain (and on past form they probably will be at least somewhat better).  I'll also wait until then to update this blog's Poll of Polls.

UPDATE : The answer to my question is that Remain lead by 9 points among the unfiltered sample (down from 20 last week).  But ORB seem to have finally decided that their headline results will be turnout-filtered from now on, so the 5-point lead can be regarded as definitive.

Drama as Survation reports that Remain's lead has dropped to just SIX points - unusually low for a telephone poll

It's beginning to look like the signs over the weekend and Monday that Remain were pulling clear in the EU referendum may have been illusory.  Hot on the heels of YouGov and ICM polls suggesting that Remain have made no progress at all in online polling (and have possibly gone backwards), we have a new Survation telephone poll that puts the Remain lead at just 6%.  As far as I can see from the records, that's the third worst showing for Remain in any phone poll from any firm - the only worse ones were a freakish ORB poll in March, and YouGov's rather artificial experiment earlier this month that was intended to illustrate that phone polls are inaccurate.

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

Remain 44% (-1)
Leave 38% (n/c)

The change from the last Survation poll may look insignificant, but it has to be remembered that the previous poll was already the worst for Remain in the series by some distance - Survation were showing a gap of eleven points in March, and fifteen points in February.  Perhaps more to the point, if Ipsos-Mori and ORB were correct that the Remain lead has dramatically surged recently, you wouldn't expect Leave to be narrowing the gap in any other phone poll - even by the smallest of amounts.  So in spite of the claims from Downing Street that private polling corroborates the Remain-friendly findings from ORB, the evidence from public polls now looks very shaky - three out of five telephone firms (ICM, ComRes and Survation) are failing to support that narrative, as are three out of four online firms (YouGov, ICM and TNS).

It's also worth emphasising just how bad yesterday's ICM poll was for Remain, once you take account of the methodological tweaks.  ICM have noticed that the earliest responders to their online polls are disproportionately likely to be Leave supporters, so they've introduced two changes to resolve that problem - they're downweighting early responders, and are also staggering survey invitations in the hope of attracting a more representative sample in the first place.  Crucially, we're told that the weighting changes alone were responsible for the equivalent of a 2% swing to Remain - meaning that without them Leave would have had a 4% lead in the poll.  But it's surely logical to assume that the staggering of the survey invitations also worked in Remain's favour, which may well mean that without any methodological changes at all, the Leave lead would have been even higher than 4% - and that would have been the best ICM poll for Leave to date.  So in terms of the trend, ICM, YouGov, ComRes and Survation all seem to be singing from the same hymn-sheet - either no real change, or minor progress for Leave.

One thing that's got on my nerves during this campaign is the succession of smug articles from pollsters along the following lines : "Hmmm, yes, it does look like phone/online (delete as applicable) polls are turning out to be more accurate.  But what's interesting is why that should be the case.  Let's have a discussion about why online/phone (delete as applicable) polls are so useless at the moment."  YouGov are at it today (arguing that online polls are best), and their ex-President Peter Kellner was at it a few days ago (ironically he took the side of phone polls).  Seriously, chaps, what you're doing is putting forward speculative theories.  It won't "turn out" or even "look like" one side or another is more accurate until we see the actual referendum results.  Then the side that got it right can gloat to its heart's content, but it really is the height of arrogance to do it now when nobody actually has a sodding clue how things are going to play out on June 23rd.

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SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 45.9% (-0.6)
Leave 40.6% (-0.3)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 42.1% (-0.3)
Leave 42.2% (-0.5)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 49.6% (-0.9)
Leave 38.9% (-0.1)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last three weeks. The online average is based on nine polls - four from YouGov, three from ICM, one from TNS and one from Opinium. The telephone average is based on seven polls - two from ORB, one from ICM, one from YouGov, one from Ipsos-Mori, one from ComRes and one from Survation.)

ICM online poll suggests the EU referendum race is absolutely level

This may help to steady the ship slightly for the Leave campaign, after a couple of recent polls that made some commentators wonder if the referendum was gradually ceasing to be competitive.

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

Remain 45% (+2)
Leave 45% (-2)

In spite of the tie for the lead, the percentage changes in this poll look perfectly consistent with the modest movement to Remain suggested by the Opinium poll at the weekend.  They're quite hard to interpret, though, because the last ICM poll was unusually good for Leave, so even if the underlying state of play had remained static over the last week, we might have expected some kind of reversion to the mean in the new poll.  Certainly if the wheels were coming off for Leave to quite the extent reported by the ORB series of phone polls, it's likely that ICM would have shown a clear Remain lead today.  Perhaps the ICM online methodology is just proving slow in picking up a pro-Remain trend that will eventually become apparent in all polls, but at least for the time being there are grounds for the Leave camp to feel somewhat reassured.

(UPDATE : It turns out that ICM have made an important methodological change, which entirely explains the small swing to Remain - without it, Leave would still have been 4% ahead.  That's incredible - it suggests that ICM haven't picked up any sort of movement over the last week at all, in spite of the hype over the Remain surge in the Ipsos-Mori and ORB phone polls, and to a lesser extent in the Opinium online poll.)

In the wake of the ORB poll yesterday, there was a lot of talk about the supposedly decisive shifts in opinion among pensioners and Tory voters.  Well, you wouldn't know that from the ICM poll, which gives Leave a more than 2-to-1 lead among over-65s, a slender lead among people who would currently vote Tory, and a healthy 9% lead among people who actually voted Tory in the general election last year.  The reason for the conflicting results is of course the well-established divergence between online and phone polls, which if anything may be growing wider.  The trouble for the Leave campaign, though, is that it's beginning to look like they may need online polls to be completely right and phone polls to be completely wrong - somewhere in the middle probably isn't going to be enough.  And even if online polls are bang-on accurate, Remain would still have at least a 50% chance of winning.

*  *  *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 46.5% (+1.0)
Leave 40.9% (-0.1)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 42.4% (+0.5)
Leave 42.7% (n/c)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 50.5% (+1.5)
Leave 39.0% (-0.2)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last three weeks. The online average is based on nine polls - four from ICM, three from YouGov, one from TNS and one from Opinium. The telephone average is based on six polls - two from ORB, one from ICM, one from YouGov, one from Ipsos-Mori and one from ComRes.)

EU Poll of Polls tightens after release of YouGov's split test

When I posted about the EU referendum polls yesterday (and updated this blog's Poll of Polls), I somehow managed to miss the big polling story of the day - that YouGov had conducted side-by-side online and phone polls to test a theory about what might be causing the discrepancy between the findings produced by each method, and that both polls had shown a small Leave lead.  This is just the second time in the whole campaign that a phone poll has reported an outright lead for Leave.  It only seems to have happened because YouGov were especially persistent in trying to contact potential telephone respondents, and as a result eventually managed to speak to enough non-graduates, who are more likely to be Leave voters.  Bizarrely, at almost exactly the same moment that these findings were released, the very recently-retired former President of YouGov Peter Kellner was expounding his own theory that greater persistence in reaching respondents would have precisely the opposite effect - it would turn up hidden masses of socially liberal people who are more likely to vote Remain.

It was rather amusing to see the personal attack that YouGov's current management then made on Peter Kellner.  I seem to recall that whenever I criticised Kellner during the indyref or questioned his motivations, it was cited as evidence that I was plainly an uncivilised cybernat lunatic!  It's gratifying to see they've belatedly come around to my way of thinking...

Seriously, though, it's hard to escape the impression that YouGov were casting around for a reason why they as an online pollster might be right and the phone pollsters might be wrong.  They homed in on educational attainment and it gave them the results they wanted, but you do have to wonder if they could have magically 'proved' the complete opposite - ie. that phone polls are more accurate - if they had lavished their attention on a different factor instead.

The bottom line is that the uncertainty continues, although two newly-released polls showing a Leave lead obviously has a significant impact on the Poll of Polls.  (Both polls are somewhat out of date, but they were mostly conducted within the last three weeks, and therefore qualify for inclusion in the Poll of Polls.)

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 45.5% (-2.3)
Leave 41.0% (-0.7)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 41.9% (-1.4)
Leave 42.7% (-1.3)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 49.0% (-3.3)
Leave 39.2% (-0.1)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last three weeks. The online average is based on seven polls - three from ICM, three from YouGov and one from TNS. The telephone average is based on five polls - one from ICM, one from YouGov, one from ORB, one from Ipsos-Mori and one from ComRes.)

Crikey! ComRes confounds us with another cracking EU contradiction

This week has been the perfect example of what drives me crazy about people's irrational responses to individual opinion polls. We've had seven EU referendum polls since Monday, and this is what they've shown -

* Five reported a Remain lead.

* Two reported a Leave lead.

* Four reported a swing to Remain.

* Three reported a swing to Leave.

As you can see, the overall picture is as clear as mud, and yet there have been big movements on the currency and betting markets, all apparently attributable to just one of those seven polls - the Ipsos-Mori telephone poll showing the Remain lead surging from ten points to eighteen. Now, to be fair, it's arguable that the trend shown by Ipsos-Mori is more important than the modest progress made by Leave in some of the other polls. If there isn't a dramatic indyref-style convergence between telephone and online polling as we approach referendum day, I would imagine the Leave campaign will be hoping to get to mid-June with a clear lead in online polls, and a deficit of no more than a few points in telephone polls. An eighteen-point lead for Remain in a new telephone poll obviously makes the latter aim seem less likely to be realised, so from that point of view Remain are probably happiest with the new batch of numbers. But there's still no excuse for completely discounting the more Leave-friendly part of the story.

One thing is for sure - online polling this week has entirely failed to corroborate the Ipsos-Mori trend. The ICM and TNS online polls both showed Leave in the lead and a small pro-Leave swing - which perhaps can be explained by normal sampling variation, but certainly can't be easily reconciled with a supposedly massive surge for Remain. The only other online poll was from YouGov, and showed the Remain lead increasing from 2% to 4% - but half of that small increase was an illusion caused by a methodological tweak. Essentially, the state of play was unchanged, which again contradicts Ipsos-Mori.

Even the other telephone polls have provided only limited backing for the Ipsos-Mori narrative. In line with YouGov, the ICM telephone poll on Monday showed a statistically insignificant increase in the Remain lead. The ORB phone poll did show a bigger increase, but as I've noted many times, the trend reported by ORB phone polling has from the start looked suspect, because it's been completely out of line with other data. The latest piece of the jigsaw arrived in the form of a new ComRes phone poll last night, which showed a slight improvement for Leave. That, I would suggest, tips the balance and makes it more likely than not that the Remain surge in the Ipsos-Mori poll was at least somewhat exaggerated.

ComRes have started using their turnout-adjusted model for their headline numbers, which makes a comparison with their previous poll more complicated. Here are two different sets of like-for-like comparisons -

Old methodology :

Remain 51% (n/c)
Leave 41% (+1)

New methodology :

Remain 52% (-1)
Leave 41% (+3)

The swing to Leave on both counts is small and isn't necessarily genuine, but it's unlikely the reported movement would be in that direction if Ipsos-Mori were correct about the Remain lead almost doubling.

So is there any particular reason why the Ipsos-Mori poll might have led us astray? Anthony Wells noticed a couple of striking things about the poll - that the percentage of Tory voters backing Remain was much higher than in other polls, and that a disproportionate amount of the boost for Remain came from mere 'leaners', ie. people who initially said they didn't know how they'd vote, but who opted for Remain when pressed by a follow-up question to say which way they'd be more inclined to vote. Ipsos-Mori include those people in the headline numbers for a good reason - past history shows it makes the results more accurate. But all the same, this referendum is an (almost) unprecedented event, and there's a good deal of uncertainty about the turnout. It could be that many of the Remain leaners found by Ipsos-Mori don't really care that much about the issue, and will be less likely to vote at all. A whopping 83% of the full sample gave a firm opinion on the main voting intention question, which is obviously much, much higher than the eventual turnout is likely to be - and further calls into question whether the others will ever make it to the polling station, regardless of their apparent inclination to favour Remain. But even if the leaners do vote in decent numbers, their opinions clearly look more susceptible to change.

* * *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 47.8% (+2.0)
Leave 41.7% (+0.4)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 43.3% (+0.7)
Leave 44.0% (+0.5)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 52.3% (+3.3)
Leave 39.3% (+0.3)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last three weeks. The online average is based on nine polls - four from ICM, two from YouGov, one from TNS, one from ORB and one from Opinium. The telephone average is based on four polls - one from ICM, one from ORB, one from Ipsos-Mori and one from ComRes.)

Winning With Willie

A real clash of the titans to look forward to as Rennie takes on Sturgeon. Wonder who will win? Should be close. #WinningWithWillie

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) May 17, 2016

It would be embarrassing if Rennie suffers defeat to Sturgeon by, say, 63 votes to 5. But I'm sure that won't happen. #WinningWithWillie

— James Kelly (@JamesKelly) May 17, 2016

It's absolutely uncanny.  In spite of the spectacular progress made by the Liberal Democrats two weeks ago, when they surged from a pathetic 5 seats last time around to a stunning 5 seats this time  (prompting the cracking open of champagne and joyous hugs between Willie Rennie and Tim Farron), I somehow just had this weird feeling - call it a premonition - that Rennie's bid to become First Minister would all go horribly wrong and he would lose to the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon by a humiliating margin of 63 votes to 5.  It seemed so improbable, and yet I should have trusted the nagging voice inside my head, because that's exactly what happened.

Election of First Minister :

Nicola Sturgeon (SNP) : 63 votes
Willie Rennie (Lib Dem) : 5 votes

Nicola Sturgeon re-elected as First Minister by a margin of 58 votes.

But give Rennie his due - at least he gave us an election. Ruth Davidson, by contrast, didn't make our day - she ran away. I couldn't help but smile at this rather charitable interpretation of her decision on the BBC website...

"Ms Davidson will not stand this time, after pledging during the election campaign to form a strong opposition."

That implied, somewhat amusingly, that the only reason Davidson wasn't putting herself forward as First Minister was because it would be a breach of a clear manifesto commitment that she wouldn't try to get elected. I felt sure that she wouldn't be mad enough to attempt that excuse herself - after all, you can't control how many people vote for you, so what would she have done if there had been a Conservative majority? Would she have instructed half her parliamentary party to resign immediately? Or would she have voted for Nicola Sturgeon just so that she could have the SNP government she promised to oppose? It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "Vote Tory, get SNP".

But yes, bizarre though it may seem, Davidson confirmed in her speech that she wasn't trying to get elected because she had promised to be the opposition. The mind boggles.

* * *

EU referendum polls are like the proverbial London buses - you wait a whole week for one, and then four turn up at once. Since the two ICM polls were released yesterday afternoon, we've had another two from other firms...

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

TNS poll (online) :

Remain 38% (-1)
Leave 41% (+5)

ORB poll (telephone) :

Remain 55% (+4)
Leave 40% (-3)

Remain activists were getting very excited about the ORB poll last night, but I'm not really sure what to make of it. The trend shown by ORB phone polls has been as mad as a bucket of frogs, and so far hasn't borne any resemblance to what phone polls from other firms have been reporting. When we have three polls from other firms conducted at around the same time (including a phone poll from ICM) all showing either a steady picture or slight progress for Leave, I think we have to be a bit sceptical about the ORB findings. It's not completely impossible that they're just ahead of the game in picking up a Remain surge earlier than other firms, but we'll just have to wait for more information to find out.

The other slightly irritating thing about ORB phone polls is that it's never entirely clear which set of figures should be treated as the headline figures. The Telegraph, who commission the polls, usually seem to give more emphasis to the turnout-filtered figures - which in this case are much more favourable for Leave (51% Remain, 45% Leave).

* * *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 45.8% (+1.2)
Leave 41.3% (+0.1)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 42.6% (-0.5)
Leave 43.5% (-0.3)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 49.0% (+3.0)
Leave 39.0% (+0.5)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last three weeks. The online average is based on eleven polls - four from ICM, two from YouGov, two from TNS, one from ORB, one from BMG and one from Opinium. The telephone average is based on three polls - one from ICM, one from ORB and one from Survation.)

Get set for Schrodinger's referendum as bombshell ICM poll reveals that Remain and Leave are both winning

After a whole week without a single EU referendum poll (almost unbelievable this deep into the campaign), ICM have broken the drought with simultaneous phone and online polls, which once again show the traditional disparity.  It looks like public opinion hasn't budged much - the phone poll shows a statistically insignificant one-point increase in the Remain lead, and although the 4% Leave lead in the online poll is unusually high, it's still within the normal range when you take account of the fact that ICM made a couple of Leave-friendly tweaks to their online methodology a few weeks ago.

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

Online poll :

Remain 43% (-1)
Leave 47% (+1)

Phone poll :

Remain 47% (-1)
Leave 39% (-2)

In line with the Kevin Williamson theory that opinion polls are always 100% accurate and that voters never, ever change their minds as an election approaches (as long as Boris Johnson isn't photographed with a copy of The Sun, naturally), we now know the result of the vote on June 23rd.  Remain are going to win the phone referendum, and Leave are going to win the online referendum.  It remains to be seen who will win the paper and pencil referendum, though, and come to think of it, that could be quite important.

Intriguingly, Martin Boon of ICM has parted company with his counterparts in ComRes, and also with Matt Singh of the Number Cruncher website, by disputing the assumption that the Remain-friendly phone polls are likely to prove more accurate.  Matt Singh's reasoning on that point has always seemed a little suspect to me - for example, he prayed in aid the fact that online polls overestimated the UKIP vote in the May 5th elections (including the Scottish Parliament election), but it could well be that turnout patterns are going to be radically different next month.  The EU referendum is the ultimate 'home fixture' for UKIP supporters, and it's not hard to see why they would be considerably less motivated to go out to vote in a Holyrood contest.

*  *  *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 44.6% (n/c)
Leave 41.2% (+1.5)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 43.1% (+3.5)
Leave 43.8% (+4.7)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 46.0% (-3.5)
Leave 38.5% (-1.8)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last three weeks. The online average is based on ten polls - four from ICM, two from YouGov, one from ORB, one from TNS, one from BMG and one from Opinium. The telephone average is based on two polls - one from ICM and one from Survation.)

This TNS poll is so God-awful for Scottish Labour that J K Rowling didn't even have a perfect response to effortlessly shut it down

The monthly TNS poll of Holyrood voting intentions came out earlier today, and the big news is that Labour have returned to their all-time low of 19% on the constituency vote.  They've only previously had one sub-20 showing on the constituency vote with TNS, and that was during the initial honeymoon period after the SNP's landslide victory in the UK general election last year.  To put it in perspective, they had recovered to as 'high' as 24% during the autumn, so it appears that something has gone seriously wrong since then.

Constituency ballot :

SNP 56% (-4)
Labour 19% (-2)
Conservatives 15% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 6% (+2)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 47% (-8)
Labour 21% (n/c)
Conservatives 15% (+2)
Greens 8% (+2)
Liberal Democrats 6% (+2)
SSP 2% (+2)
UKIP 1% (+1)

Is there any cause for concern in the apparent drop in support for the SNP?  Not necessarily on the constituency ballot, because 56% remains within the normal TNS range for the SNP, albeit at the lower end of it.  However, 47% on the list ballot is easily the lowest TNS have reported since before the general election, and perhaps more importantly, the disparity between the two ballots is much bigger than normal.  Unlike with Survation (who routinely show the SNP losing a big chunk of their constituency voters on the list), that can't be explained by an inadvisable question wording.  The explanation offered by TNS themselves is that, as the election approaches, more voters may be recalling that they do have an option of using the list vote for a different party.  I'm slightly sceptical about that, because almost half of SNP constituency voters who switch parties on the list in this poll end up in the column of an anti-independence party.  If it was simply a case of SNP voters being emboldened to be more adventurous on the list, you wouldn't expect them to be going to Labour.  I'm wondering if we're just looking at a slightly weird sample here, but future polls will tell us one way or the other.

All the same, this is a moderately good poll for two of the smaller pro-independence parties.  8% for the Greens isn't unusually high, but it's towards the upper end of their normal range with TNS.  2% for the SSP is still well below the level at which RISE can realistically expect to win even one seat, but it does mark the first time since heaven-only-knows-when that any firm other than YouGov have put the SSP or RISE higher than 1%.  Time will tell whether that's a freak result.  The news remains grim for Tommy Sheridan's Solidarity, though - they're listed in the datasets, but they failed to trouble the scorer.  In the weighted sample, not a single respondent was a Solidarity voter (although the presence of an asterisk implies that they probably had a solitary voter in the unweighted sample).

Incidentally, UKIP would have joined the SSP on 2%, but they lost two-thirds of their voters when the turnout filter was applied.  That might be a little clue as to why David Coburn and his delightful chums are highly unlikely to grace Holyrood with their presence after May.  The European election two years ago was effectively a 'home' game for them, with their supporters disproportionately motivated to turn out, but a Scottish Parliament election is very much an 'away' fixture for the Brit Nat ultras.

*  *  *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

I never got round to updating the Poll of Polls after the most recent Survation poll, so the percentage changes below take account of both Survation and TNS.  This is the first update in which Labour have slipped below 20% on the constituency ballot, although of course we're well used to seeing them below 20% on the list.

Constituency ballot :

SNP 52.4% (-0.8)
Labour 19.8% (-0.6)
Conservatives 16.6% (+0.4)
Liberal Democrats 6.2% (+0.8)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 45.8% (-1.8)
Labour 18.8% (-0.2)
Conservatives 16.8% (+1.2)
Greens 7.4% (+0.6)
Liberal Democrats 6.4% (+0.2)

(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the firms that have reported Scottish Parliament voting intention numbers over the previous three months, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are five - Panelbase, Survation, YouGov, TNS and Ipsos-Mori. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample.)

New EU referendum polls from ICM and YouGov show a virtual dead heat

The weekly ICM referendum poll is out, and on the face of it, the results look pretty routine, slotting in more or less in the middle of ICM's 'normal range' -

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

Remain 44% (-1)
Leave 43% (n/c)

However, for the second poll in a row, ICM have made a methodological change, so the headline numbers aren't directly comparable with anything that has gone before. In the last poll, it was possible to see that Remain would have been roughly four points ahead (without a distortion caused by rounding) under the old methodology, leaving open the possibility that there had been a genuine swing to Remain in the immediate wake of the Brussels attacks. This time, it's slightly tricky to work out the unadjusted trend, because the format of the datasets has changed to take account of the methodological shift, and there are one or two things there that don't really make sense. For example, we're told that the headline results are filtered by voter registration - and yet as far as I can see respondents aren't asked at any point whether they are registered to vote. Possibly ICM already have that information from questions previously asked to their polling panel - but in that case, why is that particular filter necessary? Why not simply invite only people who are registered to vote? I'm sure there's a straightforward explanation, but it's not immediately apparent. We're also told that two sets of results are filtered to only include those who are "certain to vote" - but a) that makes a nonsense of the whole concept of "turnout weighting", and b) the numbers don't tally up anyway. Only 1255 respondents say they are absolutely certain to vote, and yet 1819 respondents are left in the first filtered sample, and 1625 in the second.

For what it's worth, though, it's hard to see how Remain would be further than 2-3% ahead if the changes hadn't been introduced, so whichever way you cut it, this poll is slightly better for Leave than the last one from ICM.  The improvement is not statistically significant, but it somewhat reduces the chances that the apparent swing to Remain last time around was genuine.

The disparity between Scotland and the rest of the UK is particularly gigantic this week - the Scottish subsample figures are Remain 60%, Leave 28%.

*  *  *

Sod's law - I was just about to hit 'publish', and then I suddenly noticed there's a new YouGov poll out as well...

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

Remain 39% (-1)
Leave 38% (+1)

This one does look potentially significant, because the razor-thin Remain lead is lower than the 2-5% range we saw in the last four YouGov polls.  Even if the slight progress for Leave is just an illusion caused by sampling variation, that could mean that YouGov's current 'normal range' isn't quite as good for Remain as we had thought until today.

The Scottish subsample figures are : Remain 51%, Leave 32%.

*  *  *

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

I've been thinking for some time that I should reduce the time-frame covered by each update of the Poll of Polls, because one month seems a bit too long at this stage of the campaign.  Ideally, I'd like to cut it to a fortnight, but at the moment that would leave us with just one telephone poll in the sample.  So I'll compromise and go with three weeks for now, although at some point it'll hopefully be possible to bring it down to two, as polls are likely to become much more frequent as referendum day approaches.

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 45.2% (+0.9)
Leave 41.4% (+0.5)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 41.9% (+0.9)
Leave 42.4% (+2.2)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 48.5% (+1.0)
Leave 40.3% (-1.2)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last three weeks. The online average is based on eight polls - three from ICM, two from TNS, one from ORB, one from YouGov and one from BMG. The telephone average is based on four polls - one from ComRes, one from Ipsos-Mori, one from ORB and one from Survation.)

Leave campaign receive big boost in landmark ComRes telephone poll

As you'll remember, the Leave campaign took the lead in a telephone poll last week.  That was a genuinely sensational result, because all previous telephone polls had put Remain ahead by either a substantial or enormous margin.  The snag was that the new poll was carried out by ORB, who hadn't previously conducted an EU referendum poll by telephone.  So there were no baseline figures to work from, and it wasn't entirely clear whether there was some sort of ORB 'house effect' favouring Leave, or whether Remain's big lead in telephone polls had genuinely evaporated.  The first evidence today from a non-ORB telephone poll suggests that it may be a bit of both.  ComRes still have Remain ahead, but the lead has slumped to its lowest level to date, and Leave now appear to be firmly within striking distance.

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

Remain 48% (-3)
Leave 41% (+2)

There's still a missing piece in the jigsaw, though.  ComRes first reported significant slippage in the Remain lead a good few weeks ago, and yet the only Ipsos-Mori telephone poll since then showed business as usual.  Logically, you'd think that the next Ipsos-Mori poll would be bound to finally start picking up the same trend as ComRes, but if it doesn't we'll be left scratching our heads slightly (and not for the first time).

Online polls have of course been showing much more favourable results for Leave all along.  That wouldn't necessarily stop them showing the same direction of travel as phone polls, but it's extremely unclear whether that's happening at the moment.  ICM appear to have detected a small swing to Leave in recent weeks, but the last batch of YouGov polls (which admittedly were quite a while ago now) suggested that it was Remain that had made some progress. 

And we don't have any post-Brussels polls yet, so for all we know the entire state of play may have been rapidly transformed by yesterday's horrific events.  It's hard to know which side that might benefit - if there's an urge to show solidarity with Belgium and France, that ought to work in Remain's favour, but of course anything that promotes irrational fear of immigration might be expected to boost Leave.  We'll just have to wait and see.

I'll calculate the Poll of Polls update later, but I've no doubt at all that the 50/50 online/telephone average will show the Remain lead at a new all-time low.

UPDATE : In fact, it's pretty extraordinary - the telephone and online averages have more or less converged.  That's very likely to be a freakish finding, because there are only two polls in the telephone sample, and one of them is the ultra-Leave-friendly ORB poll.  But the rules are the rules.

SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

50/50 ONLINE/TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 44.2% (-1.6)
Leave 42.6% (+2.9)

ONLINE AVERAGE :

Remain 40.9% (-0.3)
Leave 40.1% (+0.1)

TELEPHONE AVERAGE :

Remain 47.5% (-2.8)
Leave 45.0% (+5.7)

(The Poll of Polls takes account of all polls that were conducted at least partly within the last month. The online average is based on ten polls - four from YouGov, four from ICM, one from ORB and one from TNS. The telephone average is based on two polls - one from ComRes and one from ORB.)

Doomsday dawns for distraught Dugdale as splendidly sadistic Survation survey extinguishes all hope for Scottish Labour

The latest poll in Survation's monthly series for Cleggy and the Vow-Meisters is now out, and it shows Labour slumping to joint all-time lows for Survation polls in both the constituency and list ballots.

Constituency ballot :

SNP 54% (n/c)
Labour 20% (-1)
Conservatives 16% (n/c)
Liberal Democrats 7% (+2)

Regional list ballot :

SNP 42% (-1)
Conservatives 18% (+4)
Labour 18% (-1)
Greens 10% (+1)
Liberal Democrats 6% (-1)
UKIP 5% (-1)

The Record bills this poll as predicting that Labour will finish third in terms of seats behind the Tories, but that isn't strictly true - even leaving aside the fact that polls don't make predictions, all that the poll itself says is that the Conservatives have drawn level with Labour on the list vote.  Pumping the figures into one particular prediction website may give the Tories one more seat than Labour, but it's debatable whether any prediction model can say anything meaningful about what would happen in the event of a dead heat.  The outcome would mostly depend on the regional distribution of each party's list votes.

There are also two important facts we know to be true - a) the list vote for major parties is generally very strongly correlated to their constituency vote, and b) polling for the constituency ballot tends to be more accurate than polling for the list ballot.  So it could well be that Labour's 4% advantage over the Tories on the constituency ballot tells us more about what is likely to happen on the list than the list figures themselves do.

Predictably, the Greens' spin machine has cranked into gear over their showing on the list, but actually this poll isn't as great for them as it appears.  Survation have consistently been the most favourable pollster for both the Greens and UKIP, and that appears to be due to the inadvisable way in which respondents are asked for their list voting intention.  10% is well within the Greens' recent 'normal range' with Survation - they were as high as 11% in September.

Explanatory note : As a fond tribute to the mainstream media's restrained take on the GERS report, Scot Goes Pop headlines will contain 50% added hysteria for an indefinite period.