The polling lesson of the week: Don’t get too excited about single YouGov daily poll movements
Exactly 14 months to go & LAB leads jumps to 9..BUT..
LAB lead in YouGov Sun poll jumps 6 to 9%
CON 31%
LAB 40%
LD 9%
UKIP 13%
— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) March 7, 2014
We’ve got to remember that polls can be subject to a lot of sample variation with, quite often, particular demograpihic segments having to be sharply scaled up or down. If the former then the margin of error for that section increases.
This is one of the reasons why I like our regular PB YouGov weekly poll averages based usually on five polls with an aggregte sample of 7,000 to 8,000.
What’s been very unusual in the polls this week has been that it’s been the LAB share that has been jumping about the most. In recent months that has been pretty stable around 39%.
So where are we? Nothing much has changed and there are just 14 months left before polling day.