Comments on: Was YouGov’s leadership poll “technically flawed”? (UPDATED)

By: Dan Falchikov

Dan Falchikov — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 01:55:29 +0000

13 – or not.

YouGov has an appalling record of predicting Lib Dem internal elections and the party’s public share. Almost as bad as the Parliamentary Party…

I suspect Clegg is in the lead – but there are loads of people who voted for Ming who are now backing Huhne – mainly due to Clegg’s appalling campaign.

By: tim leunig

tim leunig — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 01:22:51 +0000

Peter seems to have cleared up Martin’s point: the age profile could have mattered but doesn’t. Obviously it is possible that the whole You Gov panel is warped by non-age related issues (self-selection) but we don’t have any evidence to that effect. In addition, neither camp is claiming that it is wildly wrong, so I think it is our best guess of where things are at the moment.

By: Paul Walter

Paul Walter — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:22:14 +0000

Sorry – was 11!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:21:38 +0000

“Women twice as indecisive as men.”

Chris Squire – this “former senior pollster, now retired and teaching Politics” – it isn’t the “Pub Landlord” is it?

By: Dan Falchikov

Dan Falchikov — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:53:54 +0000

I’ll treat this YouGov poll as I do all of them – with contempt. They’re voodoo polls – not based on any statistically valid methodologies and when Kellner talks guff about MoE – he knows its spin as MoE can only apply to randomly sampled polls. YouGov’s panel poll is self selected, not randomly sampled and the subset of confirmed Lib Dem members likely to be very small in total.

I’d guess the reason for the sample size of 648 is that it represents pretty much everyone on their database who ticked the ‘I’m a Lib Dem member box’.

By: Edis

Edis — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:53:28 +0000

One factor here is that these are self-declared ‘party members’ (no-one had to show a party number to participate). The poll first asked how respondents would vote in a General Election ‘Tomorrow’ and then whether they were members of any political party (list provided). That is a crude filter for mischief makers perhaps…

By: Ed

Ed — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:28:54 +0000

Cheltenham Robin and Jo have a point but I really would like to know more about the validity of the methodology behind this poll.

The headline figure might turn out to be right for the wrong reasons if you see what I mean.

If it really does tell us valid information about Lib Dem members (beyond who they are going to vote for for leader) then it could be really useful.

By: Chris Squire

Chris Squire — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 12:05:36 +0000

Here is th =e opinion of a former senior pollster, now retired and teaching Politics:

‘Clegg likely to win as many votes will already have been cast. Women twice as indecisive as men. Clegg wins because seen as appealing, not policy or competence. Clegg the one to deal with Cameron. (Can people tell them apart?). I think yes, as members clearly want LDs to be a left wing, no difference perceived on left/right positions of Clegg/Huhne.’

By: Jo Christie-Smith

Jo Christie-Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:45:52 +0000

I think Cheltenham Robin has a very good point and once you try unpicking things like this (because it may or may not concur with your own view) you are in danger of getting completely tangled up into more and more meaningless analysis.

However, I’m going to ignore that warning and wonder what the gender split and impact of the poll was?

By: Sam

Sam — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:28:47 +0000

Last time YouGov overstated Hughes and understated Campbell. They weren’t far off on Huhne’s percentage but wrongly had him ahead because of understating Campbell.

At the time I didn’t believe their poll because I thought those in the YouGov panel were unlikely to be representative, and were likely to be inclined towards the people who were swining Huhne’s way.

It is very possible that the same factors could skew the poll Clegg’s way this time.

By: Paul Walter

Paul Walter — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:13:27 +0000

Isn’t every poll by definition “technically flawed” and needing to be treated “with great caution”. The mere fact that James Graham (plus several other bloggers) was one of those polled speaks volumes. I am a great fan of the Jamester, but he is hardly representative of the Mrs Muggins who makes up much of our membership.

By: Cheltenham Robin

Cheltenham Robin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:06:33 +0000

OR – we could wait until December 17th

By: Joe Otten

Joe Otten — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:54:12 +0000

This is not necessarily a technical flaw. The question of whether to stratify your sample, and which strata to use is a difficult one. Get it wrong and you make the result less accurate not more.

YouGov may, for instance, have a good reason to stratify by, say, sex and region and not age. But they do know the ages, so they can stratify and weight by age if that seems to be a good idea. Do we actually know whether they did or not?

I share, of course, the common Lib Dem reservations about YouGov’s methods in general, but I wouldn’t leap to the conclusion that they went wrong any extra this time.

By: Peter Bancroft

Peter Bancroft — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:52:18 +0000

It’s presumably not entirely conjecture as to what the result would be – we can rebalance the scores according to the right age ratios and see what the impact is.

I think that Clegg won over the under 35s (which corresponds from anecdotal feedback on the LDYS website) which means that, if the YouGov poll is otherwise correct, the contest is going to be a lot closer.

I was actually wondering a about the ABC1 v C2DE split – that’s ratio has to be right as well, but I doubt that YouGov have access to that kind of information (the latest public work I’ve seen was the “Neither Left nor Right” book from a few years ago.