YouGov/Sunday Times - REMAIN 44%, LEAVE 43%
Like the Survation poll in the Mail on Sunday, YouGov in the Sunday Times show Remain ahead again following the pro-Leave polls a week ago. Topline figures are REMAIN 44%, LEAVE 43%, with fieldwork conducted on Thursday and Friday (full tabs are here). Almost inevitably people are going to look at these polls and assume that the murder of Jo Cox on Thursday has caused the move back towards remain.
My own view is that Jo Cox's death probably isn't the cause of the reverse. YouGov also conducted a poll on Wednesday-Thursday for ITV, and that already showed Leave's lead falling (and indeed, a third of the fieldwork for this poll was conducted before Jo Cox's death was announced). Looking at the rest of the questions, there is also a marked shift in people's views on how they think leaving the EU would impact their finances - 33% of people now think that they would be worse off outside the EU, compared to 23% a fortnight ago.
The historic trend in referendums is for people to move towards the status quo. In Scotland a couple of years ago a couple of polls a fortnight out were neck-and-neck, but moved back to a clear NO lead by the final polls (and there was a further swing on the day itself). In the EU referendum polls have consistently shown that people think leave is the riskier choice and that people think it will damage the economy. While it was never inevitable, this has always suggested that late movement towards Remain was quite likely. If people are increasingly worried about Brexit's impact on their own personal finances, then even more so.
Of course, we will never know for sure. The reality is that we can see changes in headline voting intention in polls, but we can never be certain what causes them: all we can do is look at what events happened at the same time and at what changes there have been in other questions in the poll that might have driven a shift. What we do know is that, whatever the reason, we've got four new polls tonight - some before Jo Cox's death, some after - with three of them showing a shift back towards Remain.
