Dominic Raab shows the value of opinion polls

Welcome to this week’s edition in which, after last week digging into a report in The Times of a poll, this time I’m taking a look at the Daily Telegraph and another ‘poll’. (Quote marks very much required.)

Before we get to that, I’m planning to cover at least one recently published book on British politics which has a political polling angle to it. I might make this into a series, a summer reading recommendations list or drop the idea and quietly edit out this paragraph from the web archive. If you’ve got any suggestions for recent books with a strong polling angle that you’d recommend or would like to see me feature, either because you’ve read or written them, hit reply.

As ever, if you have any feedback or questions prompted by what follows, or spotted some other recent polling you’d like to see covered, just hit reply. I personally read every response.

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A voodoo poll is not an opinion poll

Dominic Raab with two Union Jacks. Photo from the UK Government Flickr account. Details and license here.

At first blush, the Daily Telegraph’s report seems clear:

An exclusive poll by this newspaper finds 76 per cent of over 20,000 Telegraph readers think Dominic Raab is wrong to have quit Cabinet.

But you don’t have to be a seasoned poll watcher to look at the 20,000 figure and think, ‘eh? that’s way more than required for a proper poll’.

The answer is simple: it wasn’t a proper poll. It was rather a one-click survey on the Telegraph’s website, embedded into stories such as this one and this one.

To be fair, all the instances I’ve found were behind a paywall and so the description of ‘Telegraph readers’ is reasonable in the way in which a more open access single click polls, open to anyone or anyone’s bot on the internet, would not have been reasonably so described.

(I’m assuming that the online survey was reasonably protected against a reader armed with paywall login yet also a voting bot.)

However, the embeds I’ve found came in stories that were all written with a definite pro-Raab slant. So though the question itself was neutral, “Was Dominic Raab right to resign?”, it came in a leading context.

Asking that question shortly after you’ve written, for example, “Mr Raab is right to suggest to Mr Sunak in his resignation letter that it sets an extraordinarily low threshold that will indeed have ‘a chilling effect on those driving change on behalf of your government - and ultimately the British people’” is not the most neutral way of enquiring after knowledge.

Even in a neutral context, the survey would have been problematic as those who took part in it where self-selecting. Unlike a proper poll, where a sample is chosen at (semi-)random by the pollster, in this case anyone (with a login) who wished to take part could do so. Veteran pollster and castle-dweller Sir Robert Worcester used the term ‘voodoo polls’ to describe such self-selecting surveys, to emphasise how little they tell us about the views of people who didn’t take part. That’s unlike a proper poll, which is all about informing us of the views of those who didn’t take part.

Luckily we do have a proper poll to compare with:

Note that majorities of both Conservatives and Leave voters thought he was right to go.

The conclusion? Either the Telegraph’s voodoo has given us results that are hokum or it has shown how out of touch readers of the Telegraph are with everyone else, even with Leave voters and Conservative voters. Either way, perhaps not a result to trumpet.

A handy example though of why we should be thankful for proper polls (a regular theme, ahem, in my book).

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National voting intention polls

Here’s the latest from each currently active pollster:

There continues to be a small movement in favour of the Conservatives. We finally have a poll putting them higher than Labour got in 2015.

But it’s only one poll and it’s only by one single percent.

So far, at least, the recovery is much like that for the Lib Dems under Nick Clegg in 2012-2013 - one you most likely didn’t notice, and if you did you’ve forgotten it, because it was too small (two and half points or so) to change the big political picture (doom still awaited the Lib Dem MPs).

For more details and updates through the week, see my daily updated table here.

Last week’s edition

The other headline The Times could have given its poll.

Know other people interested in political polling?

A rare good poll finding for Tony Blair, and other insights from this week’s polling…