renton

Need an ICM poll as a tiebreaker.

Well, the Survation field work largely predated the recent media shitstorm. So it's not that, I'd expect to see that backlash in the next YouGov poll if it happens.

Well there is a conumdrum. Panelbase and Survation show absolutely no movement. YouGov and TNS show absolutely massive swings to Yes. Looks more and more, sadly, like a convergence around ~48% in the polls for Yes.

See above.

You could argue it's 'interesting' in that it fails to replicate the results of YouGov and TNS, so that you'd have two previously No friendly pollsters showing massive swings to Yes and two previously yes friendly pollsters showing no movement at all.

Expect it in the next couple of days with one more on the eve of the referendum.

Patheitc trolling, or proper inability to look at the last YouGov and TNS polls and read the trend?

Yeah, it's been tweeted as 'quite something' and 'very interesting' and an increasing No lead would be just as interesting as a Yes lead, also looking a tthe fieldwork dates 5-9 Sept, would probablaby catch any waivering/panic from the last few days.

Just got canvassed by the No campaign, lovely wee chat with the lad. Spent some time asking him why the devolution proposals were so awful, no real answers.

TNS are face to face. As a general rule, face to face canvassing and polling (look back at the RIC cnavass results, for example) show much larger numbers of DKs, I think people feel more uncomfortable in answering questions to an actual human being, whereas online polls both offer a larger degree of anonymity, while self selecting from politically engaged people who are probably less shy about answering questions anyway.

Fact is that had TNS backed up Panelbase, the levels of panic (or engagement with the issue, if you like) probably wouldn't have been so acute. I think YouGov have issues, and I maintain that. I posted some pages back on why I thought PB were largely invariant to changes in Yes support levels while YouGov might be over sensitive. Then TNS came out and sided with YG. We've probably got Survation tomorrow night, and it's been more variable than PB (though not as much as ICM) so that will give us a further idea of what is going on.

You could probably, It doesn't take that much imagination.

The two traditionally No friendly pollsters started showing a dead heat between yes and No, Westminster, the BBC and Better together went into full panic meltdown mode.

Yeah, read through all the data sets. It's a real enough poll.

The regional sub samples come with huge health warnings in terms of their statistical quality.

Scot goes pop showing TNS at 50/50 excluding dks - a plus 8 swing, which is actually quite consistent with YouGov's two polls over the same period.

The face to face methodology does push the DKs higher than in the other pollsters, though at this stage, you'd expect them to be melting into Yes/No.

It's TNS and yes, though 'good for yes' doesn't necessarily mean 'ahead' it could just be confirming the YouGov trend, not replicating it's result.

Day one of the season, wearing that away top at Ayr in the blazing sunshine, both sides kept giving the ball away to each other unsurprisingly.

No. It likely is partly due to the idiosyncracies inherant in YouGov panel and weighting procedures: they were always likely to be vulnerable to drmaatic swings as soon as lapsed Labour voters started turning Yes.

TNS out tomorrow night. Should be interesting, though thier fieldwork is always about 2 weeks old by the time they come to publish. If YouGov is right and the huge swing is a very new phenomenon (if real at all) then this TNS poll will probably miss it.

Who said that, likes?

Interesting couple of polls. According to YouGov the No vote has plummeted 16 odd points in a fortnight, while Panelbase showed a modest boost for Yes post after the second debate and then showed a NC in the relative gap in this poll. I think it comes down to the relative composition of both panels. Originally, Panelbase was always the kindest pollster to yes, and Peter Kellner did like to point out that the PB panel was 'nat heavy' - Given the fact that most 2011 SNP voters were already Yes, and that the Yes campaign has been all about getting converts from the other groups, it means that PB polls tend to show good base results for Yes, but tend to require huge shifts in other groups to translate into a shift in the headline figures, i.e. they are possibly under sensitive to shifts to Yes. You can observe that in the last big shift to Yes post currency-gate when the likes of ICM, TNS and Survation all recorded dramatic shifts to Yes, but PB's shift was modest at best. Since then, they've modified their methodology to spit weighting between 2011 and 2014 Euros, which has the effect of slightly downgrading both SNP AND Labour, making it quite hard, I think, for them to see relative shifts in the polls. YouGov, on the other hand maybe overly sensitive to shifts from the Labour group. Kellner's panels were always a bit Labour heavy, and the dreaded Kellner correction was designed to root out shy Nos by splitting the 2011 Nat vote into 2010/2011 Nat/Nats and 2010/2011 Lab/Nats, the latter group is then upweighted quite dramamtically. The early effect of this was to surpress the Yes vote due to that group of 'passing nats' being mostly nos at the time (it also had the effect of mutliplying a large statistical uncertainty into those figures). Now that Yes is making inroads into the lapsed Labour voters, that group is movign to Yes and ironically the Kellner correction is having the effect of amplifying the effect. So we have two polls, from one pollster who's methodology makes it hard to see any shift to Yes and the other who's massively sensitive to it. The two show a yes vote between 48-51 percent. Both are statistical ties. I tend to think the truth is somewhere between the two, and that's before factoring my concern that BPC pollsters all based on prior vote methodologies will struggle to pick up all those lapsed or first time voters.

It might have opened up Labour to counter claims of rank hypocrisy and incompetence. Did they not demand concessions over the 2007 budget, and having received those concessions, gone on to vote against the budget (or at least abstain on it?) anyway? my memory is hazy but I recall that not being Labour's finest hour in the Holyrood chambers.

Well aye, trying to extrapolate a trend when there is no underlying mathematicla mechanism, is absurd. I did like the guys at the Uni in the States though, who produced the Baysian analysis, examining the polls in their entiriety and creating a probability of outcomes, which at the time was centred on 49% with the upper limit at 54%, it was a nice piece of work.