Latest YouGov voting intention
The latest YouGov voting intentions are now up here, and show CON 41%, LAB 36%, LDEM 15%, Others 9%.
YouGov have been continuing daily polling since the election (and will continue doing so), but from this week have started putting out voting intention and government approval figures daily again. In fact, we've been asking them both daily for several weeks, but only putting them out in chunks now and again.
I'm not going to make a big fuss of the new figures each day - not least because one can only say "no significant change from yesterday" in a limited number of ways without repeating yourself. Voting intention only changes slowly over time, and outside an election campaign there no point pretending that every new figure is going to show something exciting. That doesn't mean it isn't important or interesting though - just that doing voting intention every day requires us to read it and use it somewhat differently.
There is a metaphor that Peter Kellner used to use many years ago when YouGov was relatively young, of how polling used to be regarded as a fine wine, or aged whisky - brought out only for special occassions and greatly revered by those who had paid a fortune for it. It would be much better if polling was like running water, cheap, easy to get and already ready and available to dip into whenever you wanted to know what the public thought.
That's how you should treat the YouGov daily voting intention figures. Don't pay attention to the daily movements, anything dramatic is probably sample error anyway - rather you should look at the bigger picture and watch how they develop over time. Don't get excited over one day's figures - Labour might be up 4 today or down 3 tomorrow, but the next election is 5 years away. What is really matters is the trend, the slow (or sometimes fast) tectonic movements in party support. With a week or a month's worth of data we can watch a party's support going up or down with confidence, rather than making guess from a once-a-month peek at public opinion.
What it is there for is context, background and analysis, whenever you want to know what the levels of party support are... you'll be able to open it and see. Want to know what effect something had on party support - the figures will be there quietly ticking away. Want to look for a correlation between party support and something else, the back data is all there for you to analyse. Prefer to look at a 5 day rolling average, the figures are there for you to work out. Running water rather than Whisky :)
UPDATE: Changed this a bit, since several people were leaving commetns saying they disagreed...and that they thought what I had intended to write myself. Hopefully I've got it across more clearly now!
