The headline that is bouncing around on twitter at this very moment is that in the latest YouGov fieldwork the Lib Dems are down to 3% amongst 18-24 year-old who intend to vote. The figure further fuels the talk of a dead party wandering into political oblivion but if we look a bit closer at the numbers I think we might get a sense that daily polling really is a bit bizarre.
Below is the YouGov in depth report featuring the main three parties with all the others marked as unsurprisingly others:
Scary!
But that fieldwork was done between Wednesday and Thursday. What did the in depth fieldwork lok like between Tuesday and Wednesday?
So what causd the Lib Dems to fall 5% amongst 18-24 year-olds in 24 hours? Did Nick Clegg come out and say he wanted student places to be decided by Russian Roulette in a new prime-time ITV1 show hosted by Ant n Dec and judged by Simon Cowell? I haven’t seen that reported anywhere. Did Vince Cable get secretly recorded as saying he was declaring war on students? Again hasn’t crossed the newswire as far as I can tell.
It is just an anomaly of polling every single day. Sometimes you just speak to a lot of people who like one party but dislike another. On the upside in 24 hours our vote has gone up by 3% in the Midlands but down by 3% in the South and by 4% in London. Either it’s another anomaly or Nick Clegg did tell all out of work southerners that there is no help and he’s invested solely in new manufacturing plants in the Midlands. I wonder which…
Don’t get hung up on rogue polls folks. That is all they are.
Update: In addition it has just been pointed out to me that the sample size for 18-24 year-olds is 87 on the 2-3 Nov Poll and 92 on the 1-2 Nov Poll. I’m no math major but I think there might be a rather large margin of error there…
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