Different Populus questions show YES and NO ahead
Of late polls on AV have shown somewhat contrasting figures. Most companies have been measuring voting intention on AV by just asking the bare question that will be on the ballot paper. This has tended to show a lead for the YES campaign. Meanwhile YouGov have a tracker question on how people would vote which they've been asking since last Summer, which includes brief explanations of what FPTP and AV are, until very recently when opinion started to shift towards YES this was showing a lead for the NO campaign.
The last Populus poll for the Times did both - splitting the sample and giving half of them just the bare referendum question and half of them a brief description of what the options were - describing AV as a system where “voters number the candidates they like in order of preference, and the candidate who gets more than half the support of the voters in the constituency is elected”.
They found pretty much the same pattern as the other polls - with the bare question, 41% supported YES, 29% supported NO and 30% said don't know. When given an explanation of the systems the figures were 29% YES, 43% NO and (pesumably) 28% don't know.
People do appear to like the idea of a change of electoral system, but are more doubtful when told about what AV actually is. In one sense this is probably better news for the No campaign than the Yes campaign as people are likely to find out more about the options on offer as the referendum campaign continues. However, whether it comes across as a good or bad change to them will be largely down to how well or badly the two campaigns sell it. It also suggests that people's views are very open to change, and in that sense things could easily go either way.
(On other Populus news, Andrew Cooper has now been confirmed as David Cameron's new director of Strategy, so Populus's political polling will now be in the hands of Rick Nye)
UPDATE: Just to confirm, this wasn't part of the normal monthly Populus poll for the Times, it was a seperate online poll.
