Voting in an EU referendum

There is a YouGov@Cambridge poll out that included a question on how people would vote in a referendum on EU membership. 33% would vote to stay, 50% would vote to leave. This isn't much different from last September, when YouGov asked the same question and found 33% would vote to stay and 47% would vote to leave.

Extremely important caveat though is that this does not mean people would vote to leave the EU if there actually was a referendum. Learn from the AV referendum - before it was announced polls consistently showed people rather liked the idea of electoral reform. Polls for the first six months after it was announced tended to show the YES campaign in the lead. When the actual vote came it was a landslide victory for NO. Going back to 1975 and the referendum on whether Britain should stay in the EC, in the January before the referendum Gallup was finding people saying it was wrong for Britain to have joined the EC and that they would vote to leave. In the actual referendum the YES campaign won easily.

Historically early questions on how people would vote in a referendum have not proven to be particularly good guides on how people actually vote if one comes along.