What Better Together actually said : This latest poll, which saw 1148 adults surveyed in Scotland between 8 and 11 April 2014, also confirms a drop in support for separation compared to a recent YouGov poll that showed 37% of those surveyed in favour of leaving the UK compared to 52% who backed remaining in the UK.
What Better Together would say after the truth drug : OK, we're trying it on a bit here. We're making an entirely spurious comparison with a poll that asked the real referendum question, whereas our own poll forced people to make a straight choice between independence and an option of enhanced devolution that will not be on the ballot paper in September. (And to be frank, we were a bit taken aback by how resilient support for independence was in the face of our leading question - it was almost as high as in YouGov's real referendum poll.) The most recent poll that can be considered roughly comparable to ours was one that we commissioned in December, and a comparison between the two shows that underlying support for independence has risen by 6% over the last four months, very much in line with the trend shown by YouGov in their real referendum polls.
Independence 35% (+6)
More powers 57% (-5)*
Don't Know 8% (-1)
* The December figure of 62% was made up of combined support for more powers and no change.
* * *
What Better Together actually said : This latest YouGov poll also reveals that two-thirds of the Scottish population are clear about the implications of a vote to leave the UK, suggesting that nationalist arguments that as people learn more about separation they are more likely to vote Yes is bogus and baseless.
What Better Together would say after the truth drug : OK, we're insulting your intelligence a bit here. A large number of the people who say they are clear about the implications of independence are likely to be people who are already planning to vote Yes. The argument that the Yes campaign is actually making is that No voters are less likely to have clarity in their minds than Yes voters, and are likely to move to Yes as they become better informed. So what matters on this question is not the results for the overall population, but a comparison between the figures for Yes voters and No voters. Unfortunately, we've made it impossible to make that direct comparison, because we didn't bother asking the real referendum question in our poll, meaning that we can't separate out Yes and No voters in the sample. However, what we could have done as a second-best option is provide a breakdown of results on the 'clarity' question based on whether people prefer enhanced devolution to independence, or vice versa. Mysteriously, we failed to do that - it must have been an innocent oversight. (No, no, don't increase the dose!)
* * *
What Better Together actually said : A YouGov survey of 1,148 Scottish adults, on behalf of Better Together, found that 59% of people in Scotland believe that the SNP should not seek another referendum in the future if people in Scotland vote No in September. In a blow to Alex Salmond, 37% of SNP voters do not want another referendum.
What Better Together would say after the truth drug : Well, it might be a blow to him if he had any intention of holding another referendum in the event of a No vote, but what he has actually said is that this referendum will settle matters for "a generation", meaning that by the time a second referendum became even a possibility, he would have long since retired and left the matters for others to decide. Incidentally, that's why we didn't specify any timescale in the wording of our poll question - it was intended to make people think about what should happen in the short-to-medium-term after a No vote, and yet still allow us to spin the responses as a verdict on what should happen in the long-term as well. If we'd directly asked people whether it would be reasonable to hold another referendum after 20 or 25 years, we'd have got a very different response.
* * *
What Better Together actually said : This poll comes just a day after a YouGov survey of over 1100 Scots found that support for separation has dropped to 35%, whilst those backing further devolution within the UK now stands at 57%.
What Better Together would say after the truth drug : Well, we've already 'fessed up to the fact that yesterday's poll actually showed a 6% increase in support for independence, not a decrease. And incidentally, "yesterday's YouGov survey" is exactly the same one as today's. Our decision to release this particular bit of the poll comes just a day after our decision to release another bit of the poll. That's just the way us crazy guys roll.
* * *
What Better Together actually said : SNP should ditch separation.
What Better Together would say after the truth drug : For everyone's sake we should really stop conjuring up such challenging mental images. Where will it all end? After the SNP have finished ditching separation, will we call on them to crush vacancy, and pulverise abstraction?
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Sagacity on Saturday : A Non-Sagacity Special
"A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us."
Said by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. I'm not making this up - she had honestly convinced herself the world was LESS dangerous as a result of the existence of weapons capable of wiping out most of the human race within a matter of minutes.
Said by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. I'm not making this up - she had honestly convinced herself the world was LESS dangerous as a result of the existence of weapons capable of wiping out most of the human race within a matter of minutes.
Friday, April 11, 2014
Poll commissioned by anti-independence campaign backfires catastrophically, with almost as many people backing independence even when confronted with a leading question
One day, very very soon, we're going to start calling a brass neck a 'McDougall'. Just 24 hours after mocking the Yes campaign for using a supposedly leading question in their Panelbase poll (which, incidentally, was merely a supplementary question that was asked AFTER the real referendum question), the anti-independence camp's embarrassment of a campaign chief has brazenly published a poll in which the real referendum question was replaced lock, stock and barrel by a leading and entirely hypothetical one asking whether people would prefer independence or a devolved parliament with enhanced powers (as opposed to the status quo that is actually on offer in exchange for a No vote). It's always been assumed that such a question would produce an entirely different result, given that a number of Yes voters are really Devo Max supporters who are plumping for their second preference. So there must have been profound shock over at McDougall Central when the numbers from YouGov came back looking like this -
If you had to choose one or the other, which of the following would you prefer for Scotland?
Scotland becoming an independent country : 35%
Scotland remaining part of the UK with increased powers for the Scottish Parliament : 57%
The support for independence is just TWO PER CENT lower than when YouGov posed the actual referendum question a couple of weeks ago, and the support for more devolution is just FIVE PER CENT higher than the No vote in that poll (although of course opposition to independence and support for enhanced devolution are far from being the same thing). This suggests that underlying support for independence has considerably deepened.
Why on Earth have they willingly published such catastrophic findings? It seems that after a run of polling setbacks, bad really is the new good for the No campaign.
(PS. Can we now look forward to John Curtice referring to YouGov as "the No campaign's favourite pollster"? Fair's fair.)
Thursday, April 10, 2014
YouGov continues to cynically mislead its own respondents - but still finds a DECREASE in English opposition to a currency union with an independent Scotland
Terribly mysterious thing, this - Blair McDougall has decided to ignore the results of a new poll showing his anti-independence campaign are within a mere 3% swing of losing the referendum, and instead seems much more interested in the results of a YouGov poll that excluded everyone who actually has a vote in the referendum, ie. it's a poll of voters who live in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Now, as I've said before, YouGov have their faults but they're not blithering idiots - so they must know perfectly well that, as a matter of straightforward legal fact, it simply would not be possible for the rest of the UK to deny Scotland the use of the pound after independence. The only conclusion it's possible to draw from the way these two questions are worded, therefore, is that YouGov have consciously and cynically decided to mislead their English respondents. The first question implies that a rejection of a formal currency union would be exactly the same thing as the utterly impossible "prevention of Scotland from using the pound" (it isn't the same thing), and the second question implies that usage of the pound on an informal basis would not be available as a possible "Plan B" if a formal currency union is rejected (it would be available).
It's amusing to note that in spite of these heroic efforts to bolster the UK government's propaganda campaign, YouGov have still managed to uncover a slight DECREASE in English opposition to a currency union since they asked the question at the time of George Osborne's speech.
If Scotland did become independent, would you support or oppose it continuing to use the pound as its currency?
Support 26% (n/c)
Oppose 53% (-2)
Suppose an independent Scotland is not able to use the pound as its currency. Do you think Scotland does or does not have a Plan B for a currency?
Does 18%
Does not 52%
As the second question makes about as much logical sense as enquiring which of your seven feet you most like to kick footballs with, the results are quite literally irrelevant. In the highly unlikely event that a Plan B is required, we know that it is likely to involve retaining the pound in some form or another - either literally, or by pegging a nominally independent currency to sterling.
Much more interesting is the finding that a paltry 8% of respondents in England, Wales and Northern Ireland think they would be financially better off if Scotland became independent. It seems that deep down, voters south of the border do have a sense that London media mythology about resource-rich Scotland being "subsidised" is probably garbage.
Two new referendum polls put support for independence at the heady heights of 47% and 44%
Well, that's the last time I take anything the Political Editor of the Daily Record says on Twitter at face value. Last night, he teased us with the observation that his paper's new Survation poll was "fascinating". Combined with the fact that the anti-independence campaign went out of their way to retweet Survation's own poll alert, I took that to mean that No finally had something to cheer about after a relentless series of polling setbacks. But no, it didn't. When the numbers finally came through after an interminable wait, they turned out to be very similar to the previous two Survation referendum polls, with a No lead that is way down on the firm's first contribution to the campaign early in the year.
In the referendum, voters will be asked, "Should Scotland be an independent country". If this referendum were held today, do you think you would vote "Yes"? or "No"?
Yes 44% (-1)
No 56% (+1)
And on the headline numbers including Don't Knows, it's -
Yes 37% (-2)
No 47% (-1)
In characteristically broken record style, the No camp's embarrassment of a campaign chief Blair McDougall responded to the statistically insignificant changes from last month's poll with a peculiar line he's used several times before : "No complacency but credit to our volunteers." I don't want to be unkind to anti-independence volunteers, but given that they're widely accepted to be incredibly small in number, does anyone seriously think they're capable of being directly responsible for a margin-of-error 1% drop in the No vote in a Survation poll? No complacency, Blair, but I really don't think they are.
Just in case anyone needed comfirmation that Blair was deluding himself about his campaign making some kind of recovery, along came yet another Panelbase poll right on cue, showing support for independence at the record-breaking high of 47% for a third time in a row...
There will be a referendum on an independent Scotland on the 18th of September. How do you intend to vote in response to the question: Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 47% (n/c)
No 53% (n/c)
With Don't Knows included, it's -
Yes 40% (-1)
No 45% (-1)
The fieldwork dates for the two polls were near-enough identical, with both getting underway on the 4th of April. However, the Panelbase poll can technically be regarded as the most up-to-date, because respondents had until yesterday to respond, while the Survation poll closed on Monday.
No-one should mistake the significance of the recent run of findings from Panelbase. Until a few short weeks ago, every Panelbase poll conducted during the campaign had shown a No lead of between 8% and 13%. (That excludes only the famous poll last summer which used a different question sequence and found Yes in a 1% lead.) The firm made a small methodological adjustment a few months ago to correct the under-representation of No-friendly older voters in their sample, so taking that into consideration it seems likely that the true 'normal range' was no lower than 9-14%. Even if we're ultra-conservative and assume that the average No lead tended to be about 10%, that would mean that there has been a recent slump of about 5% - and with three successive polls replicating the same findings, there's no way we're being misled by normal sampling variation. This is real progress for the Yes campaign, and it's substantial.
It's harder to make a similar judgement about the trend shown by Survation, because they don't have such a long track record. However, their first poll this year showed a No lead that was 10% higher than in today's poll. It's not possible to make a direct comparison between those two polls because there has been a huge methodological change in the intervening period, but a rough extrapolation suggests that the No lead in the first poll would have been about 4% higher than now had the current methodology been used. So unless the first poll was a bit of a rogue (which is admittedly perfectly possible), it looks as if Survation have found a very similar drop in the No lead to the one suggested by Panelbase.
As John Curtice points out, the flip-side of this good news is that the picture over the last few weeks now appears to have been one of the Yes campaign consolidating its recent gains, rather than making even further gains. But whether that's any great cause for disappointment depends on how far back you actually think Yes are at the moment. If Panelbase are correct and the pro-independence campaign are just 3% short of the winning post, they don't actually need to be making relentless progress week on week - they're already in an enviable position with more than five months still to go, and consolidation is more than enough for now. But obviously if No-friendly pollsters such as Ipsos-Mori are closer to the money, it would be a different story.
Since Survation made a very sensible revision to their weighting procedure a couple of months ago, they've suggested a number of times that their polls can now be considered directly comparable to ICM's and Panelbase's due to methodological convergence. As today's numbers may testify, though, that's close to the truth but not the whole truth. The big remaining difference between Survation and the other two is that they ask respondents how they would vote in a hypothetical referendum today, rather than how they plan to vote on the actual referendum date. It's assumed that wording is likely to make people respond with at least a tad more caution.
Incidentally, something which puzzles me about this new Survation monthly series is the fact that James Mackenzie's blog Better Nation is listed as one of the three commissioning clients, alongside the Daily Record and the 5 Million Questions project. Admittedly, there's no longer anything unusual about alternative media commissioning opinion polls - both Wings Over Scotland and Newsnet Scotland have done it. But the difference is that both of those sites have run a high-profile fundraiser, which as far as I'm aware Better Nation hasn't. So it's a bit of a mystery where the funding is coming from. It seems to me there are four logical possibilities -
1) James Mackenzie is funding it himself (but given that it's an ongoing monthly series it's hard to believe he would go to those lengths).
2) Better Nation has one or more private benefactors (although that would be surprising, given that the site isn't as active as it was in its heyday when Mackenzie was a co-editor alongside Jeff Breslin, Malcolm Harvey and Kate Higgins).
3) Survation are for some reason providing the service for free. There's a precedent for that, because in the run-up to the 2010 general election Angus Reid provided regular polls to Political Betting without charge. But they only did it to raise their raise their profile in the UK, and it's very hard to see what Survation's motivation would be.
4) Another organisation is funding the polls and using Better Nation as a proxy. The Green Party would be one obvious suspect, given that James Mackenzie used to be their press officer. The fact that Survation recently changed their methodology to make it easier for respondents to give their backing to small parties would be consistent with that theory.
Number 4 seems the most likely possibility to me, but who knows?
* * *
SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS
With two polls today showing a slight drop in support for both Yes and No, that is obviously reflected in the Poll of Polls, but the gap between the two sides remains pretty much where it was in both of the last two updates.
MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 35.3% (-0.4)
No 48.0% (-0.3)
MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 42.4% (-0.1)
No 57.6% (+0.1)
MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 42.0% (n/c)
No 58.0% (n/c)
(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are seven - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Angus Reid, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.)
Here are the updated long-term trend figures -
The No campaign's lead in the Poll of Polls headline figures :
Sep 2013 - 20.2%
Sep 2013 - 20.0%
Sep 2013 - 18.4%
Oct 2013 - 17.9%
Oct 2013 - 17.5%
Oct 2013 - 17.4%
Nov 2013 - 17.5%
Dec 2013 - 17.1%
Dec 2013 - 16.3%
Dec 2013 - 16.2%
Dec 2013 - 15.8%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.7%
Feb 2014 - 15.1%
Feb 2014 - 13.6%
Feb 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 13.6%
Mar 2014 - 12.9%
Mar 2014 - 13.0%
Mar 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.6%
Apr 2014 - 12.7%
And as Panelbase and Survation are both online pollsters, it's also time for an update of the averages for the four online pollsters that have reported so far this year. These figures exclude Angus Reid, who are an online pollster but haven't reported since last summer.
MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (not excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 38.3% (-0.7)
No 47.5% (-0.5)
MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 44.6% (-0.2)
No 55.4% (+0.2)
MEDIAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 45.0% (-0.4)
No 55.0% (+0.4)
In the referendum, voters will be asked, "Should Scotland be an independent country". If this referendum were held today, do you think you would vote "Yes"? or "No"?
Yes 44% (-1)
No 56% (+1)
And on the headline numbers including Don't Knows, it's -
Yes 37% (-2)
No 47% (-1)
In characteristically broken record style, the No camp's embarrassment of a campaign chief Blair McDougall responded to the statistically insignificant changes from last month's poll with a peculiar line he's used several times before : "No complacency but credit to our volunteers." I don't want to be unkind to anti-independence volunteers, but given that they're widely accepted to be incredibly small in number, does anyone seriously think they're capable of being directly responsible for a margin-of-error 1% drop in the No vote in a Survation poll? No complacency, Blair, but I really don't think they are.
Just in case anyone needed comfirmation that Blair was deluding himself about his campaign making some kind of recovery, along came yet another Panelbase poll right on cue, showing support for independence at the record-breaking high of 47% for a third time in a row...
There will be a referendum on an independent Scotland on the 18th of September. How do you intend to vote in response to the question: Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 47% (n/c)
No 53% (n/c)
With Don't Knows included, it's -
Yes 40% (-1)
No 45% (-1)
The fieldwork dates for the two polls were near-enough identical, with both getting underway on the 4th of April. However, the Panelbase poll can technically be regarded as the most up-to-date, because respondents had until yesterday to respond, while the Survation poll closed on Monday.
No-one should mistake the significance of the recent run of findings from Panelbase. Until a few short weeks ago, every Panelbase poll conducted during the campaign had shown a No lead of between 8% and 13%. (That excludes only the famous poll last summer which used a different question sequence and found Yes in a 1% lead.) The firm made a small methodological adjustment a few months ago to correct the under-representation of No-friendly older voters in their sample, so taking that into consideration it seems likely that the true 'normal range' was no lower than 9-14%. Even if we're ultra-conservative and assume that the average No lead tended to be about 10%, that would mean that there has been a recent slump of about 5% - and with three successive polls replicating the same findings, there's no way we're being misled by normal sampling variation. This is real progress for the Yes campaign, and it's substantial.
It's harder to make a similar judgement about the trend shown by Survation, because they don't have such a long track record. However, their first poll this year showed a No lead that was 10% higher than in today's poll. It's not possible to make a direct comparison between those two polls because there has been a huge methodological change in the intervening period, but a rough extrapolation suggests that the No lead in the first poll would have been about 4% higher than now had the current methodology been used. So unless the first poll was a bit of a rogue (which is admittedly perfectly possible), it looks as if Survation have found a very similar drop in the No lead to the one suggested by Panelbase.
As John Curtice points out, the flip-side of this good news is that the picture over the last few weeks now appears to have been one of the Yes campaign consolidating its recent gains, rather than making even further gains. But whether that's any great cause for disappointment depends on how far back you actually think Yes are at the moment. If Panelbase are correct and the pro-independence campaign are just 3% short of the winning post, they don't actually need to be making relentless progress week on week - they're already in an enviable position with more than five months still to go, and consolidation is more than enough for now. But obviously if No-friendly pollsters such as Ipsos-Mori are closer to the money, it would be a different story.
Since Survation made a very sensible revision to their weighting procedure a couple of months ago, they've suggested a number of times that their polls can now be considered directly comparable to ICM's and Panelbase's due to methodological convergence. As today's numbers may testify, though, that's close to the truth but not the whole truth. The big remaining difference between Survation and the other two is that they ask respondents how they would vote in a hypothetical referendum today, rather than how they plan to vote on the actual referendum date. It's assumed that wording is likely to make people respond with at least a tad more caution.
Incidentally, something which puzzles me about this new Survation monthly series is the fact that James Mackenzie's blog Better Nation is listed as one of the three commissioning clients, alongside the Daily Record and the 5 Million Questions project. Admittedly, there's no longer anything unusual about alternative media commissioning opinion polls - both Wings Over Scotland and Newsnet Scotland have done it. But the difference is that both of those sites have run a high-profile fundraiser, which as far as I'm aware Better Nation hasn't. So it's a bit of a mystery where the funding is coming from. It seems to me there are four logical possibilities -
1) James Mackenzie is funding it himself (but given that it's an ongoing monthly series it's hard to believe he would go to those lengths).
2) Better Nation has one or more private benefactors (although that would be surprising, given that the site isn't as active as it was in its heyday when Mackenzie was a co-editor alongside Jeff Breslin, Malcolm Harvey and Kate Higgins).
3) Survation are for some reason providing the service for free. There's a precedent for that, because in the run-up to the 2010 general election Angus Reid provided regular polls to Political Betting without charge. But they only did it to raise their raise their profile in the UK, and it's very hard to see what Survation's motivation would be.
4) Another organisation is funding the polls and using Better Nation as a proxy. The Green Party would be one obvious suspect, given that James Mackenzie used to be their press officer. The fact that Survation recently changed their methodology to make it easier for respondents to give their backing to small parties would be consistent with that theory.
Number 4 seems the most likely possibility to me, but who knows?
* * *
SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS
With two polls today showing a slight drop in support for both Yes and No, that is obviously reflected in the Poll of Polls, but the gap between the two sides remains pretty much where it was in both of the last two updates.
MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 35.3% (-0.4)
No 48.0% (-0.3)
MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 42.4% (-0.1)
No 57.6% (+0.1)
MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 42.0% (n/c)
No 58.0% (n/c)
(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are seven - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Angus Reid, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.)
Here are the updated long-term trend figures -
The No campaign's lead in the Poll of Polls headline figures :
Sep 2013 - 20.2%
Sep 2013 - 20.0%
Sep 2013 - 18.4%
Oct 2013 - 17.9%
Oct 2013 - 17.5%
Oct 2013 - 17.4%
Nov 2013 - 17.5%
Dec 2013 - 17.1%
Dec 2013 - 16.3%
Dec 2013 - 16.2%
Dec 2013 - 15.8%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.7%
Feb 2014 - 15.1%
Feb 2014 - 13.6%
Feb 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 13.6%
Mar 2014 - 12.9%
Mar 2014 - 13.0%
Mar 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.6%
Apr 2014 - 12.7%
And as Panelbase and Survation are both online pollsters, it's also time for an update of the averages for the four online pollsters that have reported so far this year. These figures exclude Angus Reid, who are an online pollster but haven't reported since last summer.
MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (not excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 38.3% (-0.7)
No 47.5% (-0.5)
MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 44.6% (-0.2)
No 55.4% (+0.2)
MEDIAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 45.0% (-0.4)
No 55.0% (+0.4)
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Wisdom on Wednesday : The biggest 'known unknown' is that we know we're going to be wrong sometimes, but don't know when
"I believe...that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system."
Fantasy author Neil Gaiman, in his novel 'American Gods'. Although in all honesty I'd still be opposed to state murder even if I could be 100% sure that every criminal conviction in known history was sound.
Fantasy author Neil Gaiman, in his novel 'American Gods'. Although in all honesty I'd still be opposed to state murder even if I could be 100% sure that every criminal conviction in known history was sound.
Sunday, April 6, 2014
More details from today's Panelbase poll
Many thanks to Oldnat for pointing me in the direction of the datasets for today's Panelbase/Wings Over Scotland poll, which have been published unusually early, and which answer all the questions I raised in my previous post. I'm relieved to find that Panelbase have stuck with their new, more neutral preamble for a third time in a row, although it remains to be seen whether they will continue with that good practice the next time they are commissioned by an anti-independence client. The headline numbers were filtered by likelihood to vote, so are directly comparable with recent Panelbase polls - which is good news for me, because it means I won't have to recalculate the Poll of Polls figures! And the fieldwork was conducted between the 28th of March and the 4th of April, which means that the hammerblow that the No campaign suffered on the 29th of March with the leak in the Guardian is not wholly factored into the numbers. A large number of people are likely to have responded to the poll as soon as email invitations were sent out on the 28th.
Here are the figures from the poll down to one decimal place, with Don't Knows excluded -
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 47.2% (+0.2)
No 52.8% (-0.2)
And with Don't Knows included, it's...
Yes 40.8% (+0.8)
No 45.6% (+0.4)
So on these more precise figures, the No lead has actually fallen fractionally since the last Panelbase poll for Newsnet Scotland.
Much has been made of the big gender gap in this poll, but as the Newsnet Scotland poll was unusual for showing a small gender gap, it's probably reasonable to assume that normal sampling variation is at play, and that the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes.
It's also fascinating to see RevStu on Twitter mentioning a rumour that a trade union recently commissioned a referendum poll from No-friendly outliers Ipsos-Mori, but withheld the results after they turned out to be better than expected for Yes. Obviously it's impossible to know whether there's any truth in that, but if there is it would, if anything, be an even more significant development than today's poll. Ipsos-Mori are of course the only firm conducting referendum polls by telephone (they're also one of only two non-online referendum pollsters), so the fact that they've been producing much better results for No has been a crucial comfort blanket for the anti-independence campaign. But if that blanket was ever suddenly snatched away...
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Panic stations for anti-independence campaign as Panelbase poll confirms swing to Yes
When a polling organisation produces a poll showing something out of the ordinary, as Panelbase did last month by showing the No campaign ahead by just 53% to 47%, the most important question is whether the next poll will confirm the findings, or show that normal service has been resumed. To the horror of Mr McDougall's merry mob, the answer in this case is the former. Here are tonight's numbers with Don't Knows excluded -
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 47% (n/c)
No 53% (n/c)
* * *
1:05am : RevStu has now released some more details of the poll on Wings Over Scotland. The headline numbers are as follows -
Yes 41% (+1)
No 46% (+1)
The percentage changes above assume that the headline numbers are directly comparable with last month's from Newsnet Scotland. However, I do have a slight question mark in my mind over that, because in the last Wings poll RevStu headlined the voting intention figures from the whole sample, as opposed to the figures filtered by likelihood to vote (which are the ones that Panelbase normally go with). I'm not quite sure what the position is this time, and it also remains to be seen which preamble was used. Hopefully Panelbase will have stuck with their new, more neutral preamble, but if by any chance they've gone back to the old one, the last comparable Panelbase poll would in fact be the one in the Sunday Times that showed No ahead by a full 12%.
In one sense, though, it makes no difference which numbers are being headlined, because either way it's the highest Yes vote that Panelbase or any other pollster have shown since the famous poll commissioned last August by the SNP that had Yes in an outright lead. If we exclude the August poll due to the methodological criticisms that were made of it, then tonight sees Yes reach its highest level of support in any poll conducted by any polling organisation at any point in the campaign so far. That's how big this moment is. It's also a finding that is very much in line with the most recent polls from ICM, Survation and YouGov, each of which showed the Yes vote at a record-breaking level for the pollster in question.
The No lead remains on 5% for a second Panelbase poll in a row, meaning that it is still significantly below the firm's traditional range of 8-13% (and that normal range would probably be a touch higher if you factor in the methodological change that was made towards the end of last year). It's highly unlikely that there have been two rogue polls in succession, so we can now dispense with any caveats and say with complete confidence that Panelbase have belatedly joined the polling consensus showing a drop in the No lead.
A crucial detail that has yet to be revealed (although it may be in the paywall-protected Sunday Times piece) is the fieldwork dates. If those dates even partly precede the leak in the Guardian confirming that Osborne's speech on the currency was a bluff, then that would be highly significant, for the simple reason that most respondents to online polls answer the questions as soon as the email invitation is sent out. In other words, there would be a very plausible scenario you could paint of the Yes vote rising even further since this poll was conducted. But we'll have to wait and see - obviously that wouldn't apply if the fieldwork took place entirely after the Guardian story broke.
* * *
SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS
I seem to have been saying this rather a lot recently, but the Yes vote has just risen to yet another new high watermark on the headline average of this blog's Poll of Polls. And on the mean average with Don't Knows excluded, the Yes vote remains at the high watermark of 42.5% it reached in the last update.
MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 35.7% (+0.1)
No 48.3% (+0.2)
MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 42.5% (n/c)
No 57.5% (n/c)
MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 42.0% (n/c)
No 58.0% (n/c)
(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are seven - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Angus Reid, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.)
Here are the updated long-term trend figures -
The No campaign's lead in the Poll of Polls headline figures :
Sep 2013 - 20.2%
Sep 2013 - 20.0%
Sep 2013 - 18.4%
Oct 2013 - 17.9%
Oct 2013 - 17.5%
Oct 2013 - 17.4%
Nov 2013 - 17.5%
Dec 2013 - 17.1%
Dec 2013 - 16.3%
Dec 2013 - 16.2%
Dec 2013 - 15.8%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.7%
Feb 2014 - 15.1%
Feb 2014 - 13.6%
Feb 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 13.6%
Mar 2014 - 12.9%
Mar 2014 - 13.0%
Mar 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.6%
In case you're wondering, the apparent 0.1% increase in the No lead in this update isn't real - it's just a quirk of the rounding.
As Panelbase are an online pollster, it's also time for an update in the averages for the four online pollsters that have reported so far this year (the other three are YouGov, ICM and Survation).
MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (not excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 39.0% (+0.2)
No 48.0% (+0.2)
MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 44.8% (n/c)
No 55.2% (n/c)
MEDIAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 45.4% (n/c)
No 54.6% (n/c)
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 47% (n/c)
No 53% (n/c)
* * *
1:05am : RevStu has now released some more details of the poll on Wings Over Scotland. The headline numbers are as follows -
Yes 41% (+1)
No 46% (+1)
The percentage changes above assume that the headline numbers are directly comparable with last month's from Newsnet Scotland. However, I do have a slight question mark in my mind over that, because in the last Wings poll RevStu headlined the voting intention figures from the whole sample, as opposed to the figures filtered by likelihood to vote (which are the ones that Panelbase normally go with). I'm not quite sure what the position is this time, and it also remains to be seen which preamble was used. Hopefully Panelbase will have stuck with their new, more neutral preamble, but if by any chance they've gone back to the old one, the last comparable Panelbase poll would in fact be the one in the Sunday Times that showed No ahead by a full 12%.
In one sense, though, it makes no difference which numbers are being headlined, because either way it's the highest Yes vote that Panelbase or any other pollster have shown since the famous poll commissioned last August by the SNP that had Yes in an outright lead. If we exclude the August poll due to the methodological criticisms that were made of it, then tonight sees Yes reach its highest level of support in any poll conducted by any polling organisation at any point in the campaign so far. That's how big this moment is. It's also a finding that is very much in line with the most recent polls from ICM, Survation and YouGov, each of which showed the Yes vote at a record-breaking level for the pollster in question.
The No lead remains on 5% for a second Panelbase poll in a row, meaning that it is still significantly below the firm's traditional range of 8-13% (and that normal range would probably be a touch higher if you factor in the methodological change that was made towards the end of last year). It's highly unlikely that there have been two rogue polls in succession, so we can now dispense with any caveats and say with complete confidence that Panelbase have belatedly joined the polling consensus showing a drop in the No lead.
A crucial detail that has yet to be revealed (although it may be in the paywall-protected Sunday Times piece) is the fieldwork dates. If those dates even partly precede the leak in the Guardian confirming that Osborne's speech on the currency was a bluff, then that would be highly significant, for the simple reason that most respondents to online polls answer the questions as soon as the email invitation is sent out. In other words, there would be a very plausible scenario you could paint of the Yes vote rising even further since this poll was conducted. But we'll have to wait and see - obviously that wouldn't apply if the fieldwork took place entirely after the Guardian story broke.
* * *
SCOT GOES POP POLL OF POLLS
I seem to have been saying this rather a lot recently, but the Yes vote has just risen to yet another new high watermark on the headline average of this blog's Poll of Polls. And on the mean average with Don't Knows excluded, the Yes vote remains at the high watermark of 42.5% it reached in the last update.
MEAN AVERAGE (not excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 35.7% (+0.1)
No 48.3% (+0.2)
MEAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 42.5% (n/c)
No 57.5% (n/c)
MEDIAN AVERAGE (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 42.0% (n/c)
No 58.0% (n/c)
(The Poll of Polls is based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each of the pollsters that have been active in the referendum campaign, and that adhere to British Polling Council rules. At present, there are seven - YouGov, TNS-BMRB, Angus Reid, Survation, Panelbase, Ipsos-Mori and ICM. Whenever a new poll is published, it replaces the last poll from the same company in the sample. Changes in the Poll of Polls are generally glacial in nature due to the fact that only a small portion of the sample is updated each time.)
Here are the updated long-term trend figures -
The No campaign's lead in the Poll of Polls headline figures :
Sep 2013 - 20.2%
Sep 2013 - 20.0%
Sep 2013 - 18.4%
Oct 2013 - 17.9%
Oct 2013 - 17.5%
Oct 2013 - 17.4%
Nov 2013 - 17.5%
Dec 2013 - 17.1%
Dec 2013 - 16.3%
Dec 2013 - 16.2%
Dec 2013 - 15.8%
Jan 2014 - 14.2%
Jan 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.8%
Feb 2014 - 14.7%
Feb 2014 - 15.1%
Feb 2014 - 13.6%
Feb 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.0%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 14.3%
Mar 2014 - 13.6%
Mar 2014 - 12.9%
Mar 2014 - 13.0%
Mar 2014 - 12.5%
Apr 2014 - 12.6%
In case you're wondering, the apparent 0.1% increase in the No lead in this update isn't real - it's just a quirk of the rounding.
As Panelbase are an online pollster, it's also time for an update in the averages for the four online pollsters that have reported so far this year (the other three are YouGov, ICM and Survation).
MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (not excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 39.0% (+0.2)
No 48.0% (+0.2)
MEAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 44.8% (n/c)
No 55.2% (n/c)
MEDIAN AVERAGE OF ONLINE POLLSTERS (excluding Don't Knows) :
Yes 45.4% (n/c)
No 54.6% (n/c)
Thoughts of Margo, plus a graph
I always feel at moments like this that I should be paying my own personal tribute, but there's nothing I could say about Margo MacDonald that hasn't already been said a hundred times better by others. I think all of us who have supported independence throughout our adult lives know exactly how each other feel tonight. And as long-term readers can probably imagine, I also thought that Margo was a tremendous force for good on the subject of prostitution laws and regulations - or at the very least a force for pragmatic common sense, which amounts to the same thing when a powerful and ideologically-driven lobby is threatening to do a great deal of harm.
* * *
RevStu has revealed that he has a new referendum poll up his sleeve for the coming weekend, presumably from Panelbase. As far as I'm aware, there have been no hints yet about whether the results are good, bad or indifferent. I know a lot of people will be hoping for (or even expecting) more progress for Yes after the recent crisis in the anti-independence ranks. However, we don't know when the fieldwork took place, and if memory serves me right, I actually saw someone mention on Twitter that they'd just completed a Panelbase referendum poll the day before the now-legendary leak to the Guardian was revealed. In any case, because the recent poll commissioned by Newsnet Scotland marked the first time in months that the No lead reported by Panelbase had fallen below the firm's normal range, it's worth preparing ourselves for the possibility that the Yes vote in that poll was exaggerated a touch by normal sampling variation, and that the new poll will show some kind of modest reversion to the mean. If that happens, it won't of course mean that the No lead has risen in the real world, although doubtless McDougall and co would try to spin it that way!
I'll also be looking out to see if Panelbase have stuck with their new and much more neutral preamble for a third poll in a row.
While we wait, I'd better get this complex and rather wonderful graphic posted before it's out of date. It was sent to me earlier in the week by Scott Hamilton, and it's based (as I understand it) on an extrapolation of the trend from a rolling average of the last eight polls. That differs significantly from the method I use for this blog's Poll of Polls, which is instead based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each firm, regardless of when it was carried out. In my view, that method produces much more meaningful trend figures in a campaign that's been distinguished by pollsters disagreeing with each other wildly due to different methodologies. To take an extreme example, suppose eight polls had been published in February, and they had all been conducted by Yes-friendly pollsters such as ICM and Survation. And then suppose eight polls had been published in March, all conducted by No-friendly pollsters such an Ipsos-Mori and YouGov. A comparison between the crude averages of the figures for each of the two months would have suggested an increase in the No lead, even though in all likelihood the complete opposite had happened!
However, there are pros and cons in both methods, and it's worth pointing out that Professor Curtice uses an approach similar to Scott's.
* * *
RevStu has revealed that he has a new referendum poll up his sleeve for the coming weekend, presumably from Panelbase. As far as I'm aware, there have been no hints yet about whether the results are good, bad or indifferent. I know a lot of people will be hoping for (or even expecting) more progress for Yes after the recent crisis in the anti-independence ranks. However, we don't know when the fieldwork took place, and if memory serves me right, I actually saw someone mention on Twitter that they'd just completed a Panelbase referendum poll the day before the now-legendary leak to the Guardian was revealed. In any case, because the recent poll commissioned by Newsnet Scotland marked the first time in months that the No lead reported by Panelbase had fallen below the firm's normal range, it's worth preparing ourselves for the possibility that the Yes vote in that poll was exaggerated a touch by normal sampling variation, and that the new poll will show some kind of modest reversion to the mean. If that happens, it won't of course mean that the No lead has risen in the real world, although doubtless McDougall and co would try to spin it that way!
I'll also be looking out to see if Panelbase have stuck with their new and much more neutral preamble for a third poll in a row.
While we wait, I'd better get this complex and rather wonderful graphic posted before it's out of date. It was sent to me earlier in the week by Scott Hamilton, and it's based (as I understand it) on an extrapolation of the trend from a rolling average of the last eight polls. That differs significantly from the method I use for this blog's Poll of Polls, which is instead based on a rolling average of the most recent poll from each firm, regardless of when it was carried out. In my view, that method produces much more meaningful trend figures in a campaign that's been distinguished by pollsters disagreeing with each other wildly due to different methodologies. To take an extreme example, suppose eight polls had been published in February, and they had all been conducted by Yes-friendly pollsters such as ICM and Survation. And then suppose eight polls had been published in March, all conducted by No-friendly pollsters such an Ipsos-Mori and YouGov. A comparison between the crude averages of the figures for each of the two months would have suggested an increase in the No lead, even though in all likelihood the complete opposite had happened!
However, there are pros and cons in both methods, and it's worth pointing out that Professor Curtice uses an approach similar to Scott's.
(Click to enlarge.)
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Concerns raised over Ipsos-Mori's methodology
An anonymous poster left this rather troubling comment on last night's post about polling accuracy -
"James this is an excellent article and has prompted me to share with you my own personal experience.
I had never been polled before but in September I was contacted by Ipsos Mori. On paper I should be a No voter, retired professional, own my house, good company pension etc.
After being asked if I would take part in the poll, I was then asked if they could contact me on a regular basis as they wanted to follow trends.
After two or three very leading questions, one of which started "since Scotland would not be admitted to the EU", I was then asked "if the referendum was tomorrow how would you vote" answer Yes. "How likely are you to vote" answer definitely.
After a few other questions the interviewer thanked me for my time then finished the call.
I have never heard back from Ipsos Mori, I wonder why?"
Now, to be fair, it's possible that this was an unpublished internal poll for the No campaign or for one of the anti-independence parties. If so, there's no problem at all - if Better Together are daft enough to use leading questions to convince themselves that they're doing better than they really are, then by all means let them get on with it. But there was in fact a published Ipsos-Mori referendum poll that was conducted between the 9th and 15th of September last year. There was no suggestion at the time that any questions (let alone leading questions) were asked before the main referendum question, and if there had been it would have completely transformed our perception of the results - look at the way Professor John Curtice castigated the Panelbase poll just one month earlier that had asked the referendum question third.
Because this was a telephone poll, one theoretical possibility is that one or more rogue interviewers were asking the questions in the wrong sequence, and thus potentially distorting the results. It's not entirely paranoid of us to raise these doubts, because as things stand Ipsos-Mori are the extreme outliers in this campaign, and that must be happening for a reason (or for a variety of reasons). The other slightly mysterious thing about them is that they did actually produce one poll that was very good for the Yes side, way back in early 2012. That was followed by a huge slump for Yes over the course of the rest of the year, from which there hasn't really been a proper recovery in any subsequent Ipsos-Mori poll. No other pollster has replicated that trend. The only one that has even come close is TNS-BMRB, but unlike Ipsos-Mori they've shown Yes making a very telling recovery from the low point of the initial slump.
It's very difficult to explain this divergence from the general pattern, given that as far as we know Ipsos-Mori haven't altered their methodology since that early 2012 poll. So if anyone else has been interviewed by them, feel free to let us know your own experience. Were you contacted on your landline phone, or on your mobile? Was the referendum question asked first? If not, could the earlier questions be construed as in any way leading? Was there a preamble to the referendum question, and if so, what was it?
UPDATE : I've been contacted by someone else who was interviewed by Ipsos-Mori more recently. He asked to be anonymised, so I've excluded his postcode and a few other details that might conceivably be personally identifying. In some ways it's quite a similar account to the one above, but crucially there's no indication this time of any leading questions being asked prior to the referendum question. There's still no sign of anyone having been contacted by Ipsos-Mori on their mobile phone. That's important, because if they aren't calling mobiles it's hard to see how they can be confident that their sampling isn't significantly skewed.
"Firstly, thank you for your excellent blog, which has helped me to come to a dim appreciation of some of the complexities of opinion polls. I'm stimulated to contact you as a result of reading your post this morning, with details of a reader who contacted you with details of his experience with IPSOS-MORI.
I have to say that I can echo that experience. I was contacted by them by telephone (my landline) earlier this year - I would guess around 6 to 8 weeks ago, but add a significant plus or minus on either side of that. I was asked a similar set of question (no leading comments re the EU, but was asked my voting intention, which is Yes, and my likelihood of voting, which is certain). The final question which I was asked related to age - when I said that I was **, I was told that their quota...was filled, and that they could go no further with questions. I was asked if I would be happy to be contacted for future polls, and answered yes, but no further contact has been made to date.
Interestingly, I fall into the same demographic as your other correspondent...I live in a fairly affluent area...and guess I should be a right of centre No voter (neither of which tags describes me!). I don't know if these two anecdotal reports have any significance, but it seemed worth giving you this information."
If you scroll down to the comments section, you can also find an interesting comment from an ex-Mori interviewer.
* * *
I did actually manage to make it through the whole of Clegg v Farage this time, but as someone with pro-European views it was a profoundly depressing experience to have as my supposed "champion" a politician as unappealing and insufferably condescending as Nick Clegg. I'll be honest - he was so dreadful that it got to the point where I was more or less cheering on Farage. In retrospect, it's hard to understand why the public didn't see straight through Clegg in the 2010 leaders' debates, because his style hasn't changed one iota - it must have been a very weird kind of novelty value.
Instead of treating us like adult human beings and saying "that's because of the Lisbon Treaty", he'll say "that's because of something called the Lisbon Treaty, which is...", before proceeding with a patient explanation in words of no more than one syllable for his very favourite little girl Hannah, who asked such a clever question. In fact, I almost expected him to say : "That's a really important question, Hannah, and I'm going to answer it for you with what we call 'words'. Those are really cool things that we use to make up a sentence..."
You won't be surprised to hear that the bit that made the most steam come out of my ears was when Clegg abused the platform he'd been given by embarking on an anti-independence rant. Dimbleby did eventually close down the topic, but he waited far, far too long - it felt like a good thirty seconds went by. And even then, the way he did it was totally unsatisfactory - he seemed to imply he was only shutting Clegg up because independence was a rather tiresome subject. Instead, he should have said this -
"Nick, stop. This isn't on. You know perfectly well that there is no representative here from the pro-independence campaign to put the alternative point of view. The reason they aren't here is that they weren't invited. The reason they weren't invited is that independence isn't on the agenda for discussion tonight. So it's inappropriate for you to raise it, and I'd ask you not to do it again."
The point being of course that Clegg knew full well that he was chancing his arm, and if other anti-independence politicians are to be deterred from doing the same on network TV they need to know they'll be clearly 'punished' by having their transgression flagged up for viewers. A moderator half-heartedly changing the subject after the damage has already been done just isn't good enough.
Interestingly, the BBC's own guidelines call on presenters to effectively slap down politicians who try to slip in a sly anti-independence dig in interviews related to other topics. Those guidelines won't officially come into force until late May, but Dimbleby's performance tonight doesn't fill me with confidence that they'll ever be properly implemented.
"James this is an excellent article and has prompted me to share with you my own personal experience.
I had never been polled before but in September I was contacted by Ipsos Mori. On paper I should be a No voter, retired professional, own my house, good company pension etc.
After being asked if I would take part in the poll, I was then asked if they could contact me on a regular basis as they wanted to follow trends.
After two or three very leading questions, one of which started "since Scotland would not be admitted to the EU", I was then asked "if the referendum was tomorrow how would you vote" answer Yes. "How likely are you to vote" answer definitely.
After a few other questions the interviewer thanked me for my time then finished the call.
I have never heard back from Ipsos Mori, I wonder why?"
Now, to be fair, it's possible that this was an unpublished internal poll for the No campaign or for one of the anti-independence parties. If so, there's no problem at all - if Better Together are daft enough to use leading questions to convince themselves that they're doing better than they really are, then by all means let them get on with it. But there was in fact a published Ipsos-Mori referendum poll that was conducted between the 9th and 15th of September last year. There was no suggestion at the time that any questions (let alone leading questions) were asked before the main referendum question, and if there had been it would have completely transformed our perception of the results - look at the way Professor John Curtice castigated the Panelbase poll just one month earlier that had asked the referendum question third.
Because this was a telephone poll, one theoretical possibility is that one or more rogue interviewers were asking the questions in the wrong sequence, and thus potentially distorting the results. It's not entirely paranoid of us to raise these doubts, because as things stand Ipsos-Mori are the extreme outliers in this campaign, and that must be happening for a reason (or for a variety of reasons). The other slightly mysterious thing about them is that they did actually produce one poll that was very good for the Yes side, way back in early 2012. That was followed by a huge slump for Yes over the course of the rest of the year, from which there hasn't really been a proper recovery in any subsequent Ipsos-Mori poll. No other pollster has replicated that trend. The only one that has even come close is TNS-BMRB, but unlike Ipsos-Mori they've shown Yes making a very telling recovery from the low point of the initial slump.
It's very difficult to explain this divergence from the general pattern, given that as far as we know Ipsos-Mori haven't altered their methodology since that early 2012 poll. So if anyone else has been interviewed by them, feel free to let us know your own experience. Were you contacted on your landline phone, or on your mobile? Was the referendum question asked first? If not, could the earlier questions be construed as in any way leading? Was there a preamble to the referendum question, and if so, what was it?
UPDATE : I've been contacted by someone else who was interviewed by Ipsos-Mori more recently. He asked to be anonymised, so I've excluded his postcode and a few other details that might conceivably be personally identifying. In some ways it's quite a similar account to the one above, but crucially there's no indication this time of any leading questions being asked prior to the referendum question. There's still no sign of anyone having been contacted by Ipsos-Mori on their mobile phone. That's important, because if they aren't calling mobiles it's hard to see how they can be confident that their sampling isn't significantly skewed.
"Firstly, thank you for your excellent blog, which has helped me to come to a dim appreciation of some of the complexities of opinion polls. I'm stimulated to contact you as a result of reading your post this morning, with details of a reader who contacted you with details of his experience with IPSOS-MORI.
I have to say that I can echo that experience. I was contacted by them by telephone (my landline) earlier this year - I would guess around 6 to 8 weeks ago, but add a significant plus or minus on either side of that. I was asked a similar set of question (no leading comments re the EU, but was asked my voting intention, which is Yes, and my likelihood of voting, which is certain). The final question which I was asked related to age - when I said that I was **, I was told that their quota...was filled, and that they could go no further with questions. I was asked if I would be happy to be contacted for future polls, and answered yes, but no further contact has been made to date.
Interestingly, I fall into the same demographic as your other correspondent...I live in a fairly affluent area...and guess I should be a right of centre No voter (neither of which tags describes me!). I don't know if these two anecdotal reports have any significance, but it seemed worth giving you this information."
If you scroll down to the comments section, you can also find an interesting comment from an ex-Mori interviewer.
* * *
I did actually manage to make it through the whole of Clegg v Farage this time, but as someone with pro-European views it was a profoundly depressing experience to have as my supposed "champion" a politician as unappealing and insufferably condescending as Nick Clegg. I'll be honest - he was so dreadful that it got to the point where I was more or less cheering on Farage. In retrospect, it's hard to understand why the public didn't see straight through Clegg in the 2010 leaders' debates, because his style hasn't changed one iota - it must have been a very weird kind of novelty value.
Instead of treating us like adult human beings and saying "that's because of the Lisbon Treaty", he'll say "that's because of something called the Lisbon Treaty, which is...", before proceeding with a patient explanation in words of no more than one syllable for his very favourite little girl Hannah, who asked such a clever question. In fact, I almost expected him to say : "That's a really important question, Hannah, and I'm going to answer it for you with what we call 'words'. Those are really cool things that we use to make up a sentence..."
You won't be surprised to hear that the bit that made the most steam come out of my ears was when Clegg abused the platform he'd been given by embarking on an anti-independence rant. Dimbleby did eventually close down the topic, but he waited far, far too long - it felt like a good thirty seconds went by. And even then, the way he did it was totally unsatisfactory - he seemed to imply he was only shutting Clegg up because independence was a rather tiresome subject. Instead, he should have said this -
"Nick, stop. This isn't on. You know perfectly well that there is no representative here from the pro-independence campaign to put the alternative point of view. The reason they aren't here is that they weren't invited. The reason they weren't invited is that independence isn't on the agenda for discussion tonight. So it's inappropriate for you to raise it, and I'd ask you not to do it again."
The point being of course that Clegg knew full well that he was chancing his arm, and if other anti-independence politicians are to be deterred from doing the same on network TV they need to know they'll be clearly 'punished' by having their transgression flagged up for viewers. A moderator half-heartedly changing the subject after the damage has already been done just isn't good enough.
Interestingly, the BBC's own guidelines call on presenters to effectively slap down politicians who try to slip in a sly anti-independence dig in interviews related to other topics. Those guidelines won't officially come into force until late May, but Dimbleby's performance tonight doesn't fill me with confidence that they'll ever be properly implemented.
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