UK General Election, June 8th 2017

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

It seems the conservatives have been stabilizing double digit leads in the polls in the last week of campaigning, minus in YouGov. Should give them about 350-360 seats. I'm optimistic about May's chances.

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

Statesmanlike manner? What are the stupid members of the press smoking?! This is alternate reality world.

[_]

@paulwaugh  
The Wolverhampton Express & Star has endorsed Theresa May. Didn't endorse anyone last 2 elections.

https://www.expressandstar.com/news/voices/opinions/2017/05/31/star-comment-may-has-manner-for-top-office/

Oh boy more anti-corbyn Propaganda.  I assume this is a big deal that they endorsed May right?

[mgop]

if labour and snp gain majority, will we have brexit and new scottish referendum?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I assume this is a big deal that they endorsed May right?

No. The Suppress and Slur is a nasty right-wing rag.

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

The Financial Times has endorsed May. Labour Twitter is unhappy about it.

[Shadows]

No evidence that giant polls are any better tbh.

True, it need not be. But 1/2K polls are usually meaningless. Most of this small sample size polls would even pass the 95% CL. With giant polls, you have a much larger sample size to analyze geographical, age wise pattern & so on. That is impossible in a smaller poll.

The last survation poll had a 50 odd sample size, that is meaningless & you have literally no idea from that ! For country wise issues, having 8-10K etc is pretty decent, perhaps 50K isn't needed (unless you want individual seat wise data which is hard even with 50K)!

Apart from the fact that crosstabs aren't worth much for small polls, this is pretty much all wrong.

A 1000 sample poll has a margin of error of about +/- 3%, assuming that the sample is representative, which is more than enough to predict the results of the general election, roughly speaking. Because the decrease in the margin of error is logarithmic, there is not that much advantage to be had from having a sample much larger than this, unless you poll the whole country.

This is only true, however, if the sample is representative in the first place, which is the hard part of polling, and is just as much as an issue for 50,000 sample polls as it is for 1,000 polls. (Especially for yougov, as their samples are self selecting)

All things being equal, the chances of a higher value sample being more representative are MUCH higher. The whole deal here is - Does the sample represent the population? The /-3% of whatever MOE is meaningless & is a stat padder. I doubt if any of these even pass the 95% CL mark, ideally I would hope the polls pass the 99% CL mark !

There are 2-3 factors to consider -

Voting patterns are not uniform across geographies in UK for Labour vs Tories
There are multiple parties with different geographical strengthens (say SNP in Scotland & so on)
There's turnout & many other assumptions to create/weight to form a representative sample.

What the poll will try to is to weight specifics to create a representation to the possible voting demographic of 2017. They have to get it right - age wise, gender wise & in a range of factors. So that gets tougher, lower the sample size is.

Let's say 18-24 Males, they have to match that with expected demographic. Now the 18-24 males number will be pretty small in 1K poll. Likewise, we saw in the last poll, the whole of Scotland had a sample size of 50-55 odd. 25 odd males in the sample are supposed to be an accurate representation of all males of Scotland, keeping in mind age, gender & all characteristics of the population.

Thus, bigger sample size is critical. It is easier to poll homogenous, 2 party elections without such disparities in gender or age based voting pattern or turnout (especially fluctuations in polls). In a small sample, a few people can have disproportionate advantage !

[Shadows]

CNN has a surprisingly decent piece on Corbyn, considering it is not considered a left wing outlet (Ofcourse consider how right wing lunatic the British Media has become, everything will seem comparatively left).


Jeremy Corbyn: An anti-establishment underdog who's got the 'X Factor'


It was meant to be the most predictable of election campaigns. A British Prime Minister with a comfortable lead in the polls calling an early election to strengthen her mandate to negotiate Brexit, up against a supposedly weak opposition leader from the unfashionable far left of his party.

But with a week to go before the UK election, Theresa May's position is looking less than secure. Under her opponent Jeremy Corbyn, Labour is closing the gap in the opinion polls behind May's Conservative Party. His manifesto -- a raft of leftwing policies with renationalization of industry at their core -- has been well received by voters. Stories about Corbyn's past support for the Irish Republican Army and Hamas are failing to inflict serious damage. And in the wake of last week's suicide bombing in Manchester, the Labour leader's perceived weakness on security and counter-terrorism don't seem to have damaged him in the court of public opinion.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/31/europe/jeremy-corbyn-profile/

[Shadows]

woah just stopped watching the BBC Leaders Debate...

I thought the republican primary debates was crazy..

now i know why Theresa May didnt join this useless debate, 

Unless someone bragged about their d*ck size, called others ugly (including women) & con artists & shouted each other down, called Climate Change a hoax, threaten to bomb half the world & started with names like "Little Marco, Lyin' Ted", then it is just not comparable to the GOP debate.

Freaking Iran had 3 Presidential debates. Freaking iran ! If Theresa May has any dignity, she should quit politics, it is just not for her!

[Silent Hunter]

The tories need to get some advice from TRUMP on how to win elections.

They have Jim Messina, who can actually do it and win the popular vote...

[Tintrlvr]

@GoodwinMJ
Remainers going Lib Dem
March 20%
April 21%
Early May 18%
Last week 15%
Farron's strategy has been a disaster.

It's not clear what his strategy is, which is surely part of the problem. The number one goal for the Lib Dems at this point (when the press is no longer obligated to treat them as a serious option to form government, as they were in the 2005 and 2010 elections) has to be getting press of pretty much any sort, and Farron has not done so during the campaign as far as I can tell.

[Angel of Death]

The Financial Times has endorsed May.

Of all the big papers, they seem to be the most pessimistic about Brexit.

[jaichind]

Yougov.  CON 42 LAB 39 ... gap of 3

[parochial boy]

I mean, at this point it is clear that YouGov are trolling us...

[kyc0705]

I want to interview a YouGov pollster.

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

Yougov.  CON 42 LAB 39 ... gap of 3

Dear lord. I know I'm not the one to discredit polls but YouGov has been inconsistent throughout this entire campaign.

[IceAgeComing]

Sir David Butler (who you all should be and follow on Twitter right now) said that the polls in this campaign are probably more varied than in any campaign ever which from a quick check is totally correct - it means that someone will end up with egg on their face next week though.  Its healthy for polling companies though really to release data that they think might be an outlier - one of them had a poll that they thought was wrong and didn't bother publishing because it was far out in the 2015 campaign that actually got the results pretty much bang on.

Don't know if yougov have been inconsistent really: from what I remember they've always had Labour higher than everyone else and the Tories lower.  Although the Conservative position is now pretty consistent in all of those polls, the main difference is Labour's position - although that's pretty damn important.  There's a lot of unskewing the polls syndrome going on in this thread though which is silly as well - I mean poll subsamples are all Terrible by default anyway...

[IceAgeComing]

you shouldn't be shocked about a Tory having incredibly weird views at this point

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

I really hope ICM and PanelBase are correct. I have such a distaste for Corbyn, his leadership skills, and his policies.

I'd love to hear how a U.S. Democrat with the name "PittsburghSteel" could possibly support someone like May. (Or Merkel, for that matter)

I apologize for the confusion. I'm not a working class democrat therefore people like Schulz, Corbyn, Trump, or Sanders do not appeal to me.  My name does give that thought.

[IceAgeComing]

I mean that's an incredibly dumb thing to believe for lots of reasons (biggest for me other than the inclusion of bloody Trump in a list of politicians who are on the left was... Schultz?  I mean I like the guy for a few reasons (I'm a lot more pro-EU than I was a few months back), but he's not exactly on the left of the SPD - pro-TTIP for example which I disagree with a lot) but disagreeing with a left politician isn't an excuse to support the Tories in anything, because the policies of the latter are bad and you should oppose them - unless you like the idea of stealing the homes of dementia patients...

[Dr Oz Lost Party!]

I mean that's an incredibly dumb thing to believe for lots of reasons (biggest for me other than the inclusion of bloody Trump in a list of politicians who are on the left was... Schultz?  I mean I like the guy for a few reasons (I'm a lot more pro-EU than I was a few months back), but he's not exactly on the left of the SPD - pro-TTIP for example which I disagree with a lot) but disagreeing with a left politician isn't an excuse to support the Tories in anything, because the policies of the latter are bad and you should oppose them - unless you like the idea of stealing the homes of dementia patients...

1) My views aren't dumb. 2) I'm a moderate democrat, something I forgot to include. 3) we are here to talk about the British election.

[parochial boy]

Re un skewing polls, obviously yeah its a dumb idea as after all, yougov had the tories on a 24% lead  in April and they haven't changed their methodology, so obviously something dramatic has changed which you cant unmake b arguing about how they weight 18-24s or whatever.

The alternative is that their panel has been swamped by Corbyn supporters in the last month, but I would assume (hope) the had some way of filtering out the impact of that.

Having said that, I do feel that, although one crosstab is clearly useless, by aggregating them over a number of polls, you can get a broad picture of the way thing are (not accurate numbers of course !). So I think we can say that Labour are winning young voters heavily, even if it would be presumptuous to try and argue over the exact extent of their lead.

[IceAgeComing]

I mean that's an incredibly dumb thing to believe for lots of reasons (biggest for me other than the inclusion of bloody Trump in a list of politicians who are on the left was... Schultz?  I mean I like the guy for a few reasons (I'm a lot more pro-EU than I was a few months back), but he's not exactly on the left of the SPD - pro-TTIP for example which I disagree with a lot) but disagreeing with a left politician isn't an excuse to support the Tories in anything, because the policies of the latter are bad and you should oppose them - unless you like the idea of stealing the homes of dementia patients...

1) My views aren't dumb. 2) I'm a moderate democrat, something I forgot to include. 3) we are here to talk about the British election.

the idea that Martin Shultz and Jeremy Corbyn are at all comparable politically is incredibly dumb - Schultz is as mainstream as mainstream gets in the SPD while Corbyn... isn't - the man supported TTIP, for christs sake.

It doesn't matter how "moderate" you are; if you identify with the democrats your values ought to make you sceptical of the Tories - especially a Conservative party led by Teresa May, when you look into the things that she did as Home Secretary (changes in family migration meaning that families who earn less than £18,000/year aren't allowed to bring a spouse or child into the UK with them, very extreme deportation policies, the "GO HOME" vans that they paid to drive around London, the Snoopers Charter, I could go on here) as well as the things promised in the Tory manifesto - I mentioned the Dementia Tax, they also plan to means-test Winter Fuel Payments for pensioners, take free school lunches away from infants, ending the ban on new state-funded selective schools, etc) plus their record since 2010 should not be the sort of thing that you ought to support.  Even if Labour (who aren't exactly standing on a HARD LEFT manifesto; the party generally agree on what sort of policies they should have) aren't for you there are plenty other options in the UK - the Greens, the SNP or Plaid, the Libs if you have to...

I'm not even going to address that last point; because we are talking about it - your perception of it, at least.  The only people who really should be going around telling people what to post are the mods..

[Devout Centrist]

Yougov.  CON 42 LAB 39 ... gap of 3

YouGov is wrong, I bet

[Blair]

The only thing that will make this election worse is if there's a leadership contest after