Saturday, July 12, 2008

Poll disparity

A mere couple of day ago the Daily Telegraph (ignore the bit about Independence!) had the SNP ahead of Labour for 'Westminster voting intentions' by a clear 4-points ... yet, I've just spotted this Glasgow East poll, which is being run in tomorrow's Sunday Telegraph which has Labour ahead of the SNP by 14-points ...

... now, I know the first is a generic poll on Scottish UK-voting intentions, and the second is a Glasgow East specific poll - but the disparity in the figures is just huge!

Well, as mentioned earlier, I'm off to Glasgow tomorrow so will let you know what I experience - but one of those polls surely has to be very, very wrong ... no prizes for guessing which I'd prefer to be accurate ;-)

5 comments:

Will said...

Actually, on Swing, the ICM Glasgow East poll is broadly in line with the YouGov Scotland Omnibus: ICM predicts a 15% swing to ourselves in GE; the YouGov Scotland-wide poll has a Lab-SNP swing of 13%, so you've got two pollsters looking at two different samples, but finding a similar trend.

On that basis, it's also a vindication of Uniform National Swing which seems to have been dumped in favour of Martin Baxter's far more fashionable Electoral Calculus model.

Andrew said...

Will

Thanks for the explanation - I was clearly forgetting that Labour's 'Glasgow East' vote-share in 2005 was over 60% ... which wasn't, unfortunately, the case across the whole of Scotland :-(

Andrew

Jeff said...

This seems a bit of a remarkable misunderstanding.

I think it was pretty clear to most people involved in Scottish Politics (or even casually interested) that a 4% lead for SNP nationally would equate to a very sizeable lead for Labour in Glasgow East.


Oh well, at least Will was around to put you straight... ;)

Andrew said...

Jeff

Strictly speaking - 'guilty as charged'. My mistake.

... but, come on, looking across SNP-bits of the blogosphere you can find plenty of examples of Nats hailing Thursday's poll as the end of all-things Labour.

All I was doing was trying to highlight the existence of some hope :-)

... maybe I should have been uncharacteristically tribal and just put up a post entitled "SNP set to lose Glasgow East"?

... no fun this pluralism lark :-(

Andrew

Jeff said...

As you say, it's the SNP who need to be more pluralist given the result of the last poll.

Optimism is one thing, delusion is another. I suspect Curran had this in the bag the day she was nominated for Labour...


PS That's Margaret, not Frances of course...!