Daily YouGov polls for the Conference season
YouGov are carrying out genuine daily voting intention polls throughout the conference season. The first week's figures for the Lib Dem conference are up on the YouGov website here now (hopefully - it's IP blocked until we pass the embargo at 10.15!), and for the next two weeks they'll go out daily there and on Sky News at 5pm. As well as voting intention, there will be daily topical questions on whatever issues arise at the conferences.
In the past daily polling has almost always been a "rolling poll", so each day's sample was actually made up of a couple of days small samples, with the oldest one dropping off each day to be replaced by new data. Each day's YouGov poll is a completely new sample of 1000 people (less than the normal YouGov sample of 2000, to make sure we don't start asking people too regularly). They are also being carried out in just 24 hours, so the data published on Monday was all collected on Sunday and Monday morning, Tuesday's data was collected between Monday and Tuesday (for those of who interested in the mechanics, in the past we were wary of really quick polls in case people who responded fast to surveys were different from people who responded slowly. We've got round this using a different method of inviting people to surveys, without going into details the end result is that some of the people answering the daily surveys will have been invited a day or two before the survey even began, meaning you still get a mix of fast and slow respondents).
The latest voting intention figures are CON 40%, LAB 24%, LDEM 21%. As you can see from the graph, the Lib Dems peaked straight after Nick Clegg's conference speech when they reached 23%, but only for a day. Their Friday score of 21% is still significantly up on the 17% they scored on Monday at the beginning of conference season. The Conservatives went down to 38% at the same point, but ended the first week of conference season back at 40% (still down on the last YouGov poll from before conference which had them at 41%).
The big losers so far as Labour, pushed down to 24%. Of course, starting today we will have the first daily poll conducted during the Labour conference, and in the next few days we may (or may not) see Labour's totals climbing.
