Latest ComRes and YouGov polls
A quick update on some polling figures from the last few days.
ComRes released a new telephone poll for the Daily Mail on Friday. Topline voting intention figures were CON 37%, LAB 32%, LDEM 6%, UKIP 12%, GRN 4% (tabs are here.) On the EU referendum ComRes had voting intentions of REMAIN 54%, LEAVE 36%, DK 10%.
YouGov also released new figures on voting intention and the EU referendum on their website. Their lastest topline VI figures are CON 39%, LAB 30%, LDEM 6%, UKIP 17%, GRN 3% (tabs are here). On the EU referendum they have Leave slightly ahead - REMAIN 38%, LEAVE 42%, DK/WNV 20%.
Finally Ipsos MORI also released EU referendum figures (part of the monthly Political Monitor survey I wrote about earlier in the week). Their latest figures are REMAIN 50%, LEAVE 38%, DK 12%.
There continues to be a big contrast between EU referendum figures in polls conducted by telephone, and conducted online. The telephone polls from ComRes and Ipsos MORI both have very solid leads for remain, the online polls from ICM, YouGov, Survation and others all tend to have the race very close. In one sense the contrast seems to be in line with the contrast we saw in pre-election polls - while there was little consistent difference between online and telephone polls in terms of the position of Labour and the Conservatives (particularly in the final polls), there was a great big gulf in terms of the levels of UKIP support they recorded - in the early part of 2015 there was a spread of about ten points between those (telephone) pollsters showing the lowest levels of UKIP support and those (online) pollsters showing the highest levels of UKIP support. It doesn't seem particularly surprising that this online/telephone gap in terms of UKIP support also translates into an online/telephone gap in terms of support for leaving the EU. In terms of which is the better predictor it doesn't give us much in the way of clues though - the 13% UKIP ended up getting was bang in the middle of that range.
The other interesting thing about the telephone/online contrast in EU referendum polling is the don't knows. Telephone polls are producing polls that have far fewer people saying they don't know how they'll vote (you can see it clearly in the polls in this post - the two telephone polls have don't knows of 10% and 12%, the online poll has 20% don't knows, the last couple of weekly ICM online polls have had don't knows of 17-18%). This could have something to do with the respective levels of people who are interested in politics and the EU that the different sampling approaches are picking up, or perhaps something to do with people's willingness to give their EU voting intention to a human interviewer. The surprising thing is that this is not a typical difference - in polls on how people would vote in a general election the difference is, if anything, in the other direction - telephone polls find more don't knows and refusals than online polls do. Why it's the other way round on the EU referendum is an (intriguing) mystery.
