Tag Archives: adam ludlow

Six months from 7th May 2015: how the polls are looking and what to look for

There are three key things about opinion polls.

The first is what matters are trends, not individual poll fluctuations.

The second is they’re snapshots, not forecasts. (A point made by Lord Ashcroft, to his credit, every time he publishes his latest poll finding.)

The third is the next general election won’t be decided by national party vote shares but by who wins in 650 individual seats. (A point often made by PoliticalBetting’s Mike Smithson.)

Here are the trends…

Here’s a graph which focuses solely on the first of these. It shows the result of every single opinion poll – courtesy Mark Pack’s invaluable spreadsheet – in the 12 months from October 2013 to September 2014 (incl.):

poll trends 2014

Posted in Polls | Also tagged , , , and | 69 Comments
Advert

Recent Comments

  • Alex Macfie
    Except that "referendum" is not a Latin 2nd Declension Neuter noun. It's a gerundive; as such it is used in English differently from Latin so should take an Eng...
  • PM
    @ PM, It can be either. I do remember from my schooldays that the plural in Latin involved replacing the 'um' of a neuter noun by an 'a'. I must have managed...
  • Alex Macfie
    It's "referendums"....
  • Alex Macfie
    Whether or not the comment about dead people was appropriate, it's dangerous to assume that high support for a position among youth, or a general trend of risin...
  • paul barker
    The problem with Referenda is that they are usually binary, giving Voters only two choices when there are actually multiple possibilities. Not only is that und...