renton

I suppose if you'd said to me a month ago that we'd be going in at 48-49% in the polls, I'd have bit your hand off. the fact that the Yes vote held up through the last week as well has to be a positive. It's going to be down to those newly registered voters I think. How closely will they follow the trend of the polls?

Still voting Yes?

Actually, in all three cases the surveys are software algorithms dished out to folk who have volunteered to be polled.

lol, had to be.

Certainly fucked it up in 2007.

Their political editor clearly wants to jump for Yes - check out recent favourable coverage for Yes and his recent editorial, but I'd guess Murdoch has him on a tight leash.

f**k off. What would you like? I nice wee fantasy where it doesn't matter how far behind we are, we're obviously in front? It is what it is. The Yes vote has largely held up and converged around 48-49% Whether that's enough is based on to wht extent those new voters that BPC pollsters struggle with follow the trend seen in their panels, and to what extent 'f**k it' or 'shite it' dominates the polling booths,

Opinium poll at 48/52 as well. What's the betting Survation comes in at the same.

It doesn't work like that, a statistically significant sample should be able to discern to a reasonable degree od accuracy of a larger population, assuming it's weighed right of course.

If you look at the median of recent results, it's in the mix, an is still technically a statistical tie. I think if Survation comes out the same we are going to go into polling day at 48-49% in the polls. Good enough? Depends on a lot of factors. The youth vote and C2D2E newly registered boters breaking yes, a soft edge to the yes vote, turnout......

Unless they are going from their last ICM/Scotsman poll. Because it's Y down 6, N up 6 based on the 700 size poll from Saturday and 1 down based on the Guardian's telephone poll.

It's definitely 48 Y 52 N

3.8% down to 3%, it's not really a huge difference, it's just that saturday's poll threw out one at the extreme of it's distribution.

No......

There you have it, massive outlier from the 700 size sample on saturday. You can take it as massively down on that poll or you can take it as 1 down from the ICM phone poll. take your pick. Still statistical tie, looks likely we'l be going in at this kind of level into referndum day.

They've been better with embargos since that 51/49 poll, apparently they keep getting city traders phoning up looking for inside information.

Behave. Last one was a massive outlier, I'd take 50% right now.

I see bet fair have decided it's all over: now paying out on a no vote.

It's true we can't ignore previous referndums, but at the same time, different actors with different demographics,different socio-economic factors, different policy issues and 20 years of global change means theres a limitation as to how much read across from Quebec you can have.

really, I was under the impression that this was a group that never needs much in the way of upweighting, and indeed has been relatively stable across all the pollsters.

Depends on which you do a poll of polls, there are a couple of different methodologies - either the last set of polls in a month, or the last six polls by all the involved pollsters, at the moment doing a poll of polls base don the latter methodology is likely to depress the Yes position as it includes an oldish Ipsos-Mori (though it looks like that will be shortly remedied). The other issue with poll of polls is that for a long time they've merely generated a false middle through wildly different methodologies - that's lessened now but again, with ipsos in there you are still likely to see a big No lead even though everyone else reckons it's even stevens. based on the run of the last few polls from PB, Survation, ICM, YG and TNS I'd reckon it's 50/50 - we've seen Yes in the range 46 to 54 over those polls but removing the outliers sees yes in the range 49-51. I'd also go back to something I noted previously, that big yes swings were in Younger groups and C2D2E percentiles - both groups likely to make up a lot of the newer voters who've been undersampled in BPC pollsters. Against that, you've got the 'silent majority', 'shy no' narrative of which there is absolutley no proof of it being a major phenomenon, but there is the more real possiblity of Yes shedding a couple of points based on previous referendum performances. How do those two factors cancel out? Does the yes group have a soft edge? Given how the Yes vote held up after last weeks blitz you'd think not much, but then they might waiver when in the actual booth. Will those big swings to Yes in lower income and younger age groups seen by the RIC and the BPC pollsters actually turn up on the day? I don't think there is much in it, I don't on the face of it see a reason to suppose that No has an advantage at this point, that might change tonight with TNS due out at 5pm and you'd assume the YouGov one out late tonight for publication in the papers tomorrow.

A No vote is as likely as a Yes vote based on the current polls.

No, merely that an inability to find enough 'real' respondents in a given poll leads to a large upweighting in those groups, and with it and upwieighting in the statistical margin of error for that group which can lead to inaccurate or volatile results (see Survation and it's inability to find enough 16-24s). I figure that Ipsos consistently No friendly results are something to do with their demographic breakdown of the populace - upweighting in certain age groups would introduce volatility from one sample to the next, but not a consistently depressed Yes vote with repsect to the other pollsters.

Yeah, they've has that problem through the entire campaign.

Wrote a long rambling thing about it a month or two ago, I said then I thought it would be 45/55 No, based entirely on what the BPC pollsters were showing. In that time Yes have managed to close the gap with YouGov, Panelbase, TNS and Panelbase now all showing a statistical dead heat, so Yes looks good for anything in the range 48-52. Even when I've been hopeful of a Yes win, I've never seen us winning by a big margin - assuming the Yes vote holds up between now and then and you get them out on the day, I reckon 52-48 Yes. That's flipping a coin, it could easily be the other way, but mind that the BPC guys all carry a +/- 3% margin so with the current polls there is a huge degree of uncertainty - hence why YG is doing a large sample poll to try and get that polling MOE down to +/- 1%