This blog collects perspectives on the election you won't find anywhere else, by political experts, based in the School of Politics and International Relations at The University of Nottingham.



Thursday 15 April 2010

More MOE

"Move along, there’s nothing to see. Yet."

Yesterday I pointed out how the polls had been remarkably stable during the campaign, despite talk of their ‘volatility’, once you allowed for the margin of error inherent in sampling. Up till then, all but one poll during the campaign had put the Conservatives on 37 +/-3, Labour on 30 +/-3.


Since then we’ve had three more national polls. YouGov had 41/32/18. ComRes had 35/29/21. And Harris had 36/27/23. Fairly obviously, one of these – the YouGov poll – doesn’t fit into that earlier pattern, because it has the Conservatives on 41.

But it’s still hardly evidence of any great shift. It just means that over the last week every poll has had the Conservatives on 38+/-3 (rather than 37) and every poll has still had Labour on 30+/-3. Indeed, this is true of every poll since the campaign began.

Move along, there’s nothing to see. Yet.

Professor Philip Cowley

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please feel free to post comments, but please note comments are moderated, and offensive or inappropriate comments will not be published.