If we vote for Brexit what happens

TrickyTree83

Filo25 wrote: »

They do serve a purpose but its always more difficult to poll for one-off events like this, you can't ask people how they voted last time so that you could use the previous vote as a baseline.

Tough to get representative samples in all ways as well, there are certain factors which strongly influence how people will vote.

Yougov have already pointed out an issue with at least some of the Phone polls oversampling voters with a university level education, who are much more likely to vote remain.

I imagine future phone polls will be screening for that so we'll see if they yield radically different results.

But then my argument against that would be that they've had plenty of experience polling election results and last time they were grossly incorrect. As you say it's difficult to poll a referendum like this, surely even more difficult given their recent inaccuracy in a general election.

If you were into conspiracy you might think the polls are there to persuade the undecided voter to move with the largest flock (according to the polls anyway).

CLAPTON

why do people assume that polls should be accurate?

the purpose of campaigning is to change people's minds, so one shouldn't be totally surprised if people do indeed change their mind.

Filo25

TrickyTree83 wrote: »

But then my argument against that would be that they've had plenty of experience polling election results and last time they were grossly incorrect. As you say it's difficult to poll a referendum like this, surely even more difficult given their recent inaccuracy in a general election.

If you were into conspiracy you might think the polls are there to persuade the undecided voter to move with the largest flock (according to the polls anyway).

If you were equally into conspiracy theories from the Remain side you would say that polls were to encourage complacency to depress turnout and ensure a massive win for the more motivated Brexit side.

Personally I'm not, as bad as the polling result for the general election was, on % of the vote it was probably roughly 3% understated for the Tories on average and 3% overstated for Labour, which was a significant error clearly but not completely ludicrous.

Its still worthwhile having polls rather than trying to go on people saying that "Everyone I know is voting leave/remain".

Filo25

CLAPTON wrote: »

why do people assume that polls should be accurate?

the purpose of campaigning is to change people's minds, so one shouldn't be totally surprised if people do indeed change their mind.

They're only intended to be a snapshot of opinion at one point in time during a campaign, and not predictive in nature.

Trends in individual polls are interesting to follow over time though.

Hopefully methodology will improve as the campaign continues, as well, I will be interested to see if phone polls start ensuring they are polling a representative level of graduates and what results that generates.

TrickyTree83

I would much prefer people were not influenced by polls either way, or by who they know is voting leave/remain. I would hope an individual will look at all of the available literature, try to pick it apart and decide what is true or not, or rather what they believe to be true or not.

Filo25

TrickyTree83 wrote: »

I would much prefer people were not influenced by polls either way, or by who they know is voting leave/remain. I would hope an individual will look at all of the available literature, try to pick it apart and decide what is true or not, or rather what they believe to be true or not.

I don't polls have too much of an issue, opinions of friends and colleagues might though, and to be honest I think the quality of debate from both sides of the campaign has been so poor that I suspect for most people it has just hardened opinions rather than moved many from one camp to the other, its how the don't knows or the less interested voters break late in the campaign that will be most important I suspect.

CLAPTON

Filo25 wrote: »

They're only intended to be a snapshot of opinion at one point in time during a campaign, and not predictive in nature.

Trends in individual polls are interesting to follow over time though.

Hopefully methodology will improve as the campaign continues, as well, I will be interested to see if phone polls start ensuring they are polling a representative level of graduates and what results that generates.

I might speculate that we will only know that the methodology has improved, after the referendum results are known

Filo25

CLAPTON wrote: »

I might speculate that we will only know that the methodology has improved, after the referendum results are known

Yes and No, obviously that will be the final judge of any set of polling, but even then you always have the possibility of late swing, so that the polls were accurate but you had a significant number of voters change their minds late.

In any case if there are clear issues with samples being unrepresentative then I would say it should clearly improve the polling to adjust for that.

Obviously at this stage we don't know how many phone polls were affected by the possible issue of over representing graduates, I don't even know if all polls have asked questions on education levels historically.

If there is a factor which does appear to have a significant impact on people's voting choices then I would say its common sense that you should try to ensure that with respect to that factor your sample should be weighted to be as representative of the general population as possible.

Rinoa

How the Sun depicts Gideon this morning.

Quite a few in the Tory party are not very happy with his exaggerated project fear campaign.





http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/politics/7170397/Tories-at-breaking-point-over-George-Osbornes-doomsday-Brexit-prediction-including-claims-of-almost-a-MILLION-job-losses.html

michaels

The Beeb had a vox pop last night in which all the old people wanted to leave and all the young people wanted to stay - of course neither side was allowed to express any realistic reason for their preference ('we dont want all them foreigners coming over' / 'I like to go to Ibiza')

I was a bit put out by the young person telling the old person that their vote should count for more because they wold live for more years under the consequences of the decison....