The misleading mystique of "internal polling"

Last week I wrote about how political polling is often more boring than it seems. This week, let’s apply the same editorially self-destructive line to ‘leaked internal polling’ because, as regular as clockwork, news from another presentation about polling by Conservative advisor Isaac Levido has been passed to the media.

This one has the mystique of ‘internal polling’ attached to it, claiming that internal polling shows the Conservative Party’s ratings on the economy to be better than public polling tells us it is.

So is internal polling really the special path to a truth missed by public data? Read on to find out…

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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Internal polling: it’s not the secret insider dope

Image by Tayeb MEZAHDIA from Pixabay.

‘Internal polling’ has a mystique about it. It sounds like special, insider information, spilling the beans on the truth that were meant to be kept out of the public eye.

Yet as I wrote in my book, Polling UnPacked:

Internal political polls are not some magical, superior source of information.

Internal political polls generally ask the same or similar questions as public polls. Moreover, the budgets political parties or candidates allocate to such polls are frequently modest, at least outside the USA – and even at many levels of election in the USA.

Yet the problems and risks internal political polls have to grapple with are the same as for public polls, and in fact in some ways worse.

Being private polls for a particular client, there is a risk that the lack of transparency results in skewed findings that favour the client, deliberately or inadvertently.

Likewise, it is much easier for reporting to slip up on what a poll really says if it is a report on a private poll, perhaps only briefly or partially seen by a journalist, and often a general political journalist rather than a polling expert. (The journalistic skills you need to get leaks of internal political information are very different from the skills you need to make sense of a pdf of opinion poll data. One is about charming humans, the other is about analysing data.)…

You also do not have to be too cynical to wonder if sometimes figures are made up, or at least generously weighted and rounded of. It is smarter to be quizzical than to be excited when hearing of reports of internal polls.

Internal polls, where genuine, can nonetheless be useful, to tease out extra information that those running parties and campaigns need to know, such as tracking voting intention in particular areas of the country or society, adding greater detail than national polls provide or testing out different policy ideas ahead of deciding which to select and campaign on.

But if they tell a significantly different story from the public polls, that is almost always because they are wrong.

I go on to give examples of the secret insider polls that contradict public polling also turning out to contradict the truth.

But my favourite example of the undue mystique given to internal polling is slightly different, and comes from 2020:

A superb example of the absurd reverence given to ‘internal’ polling came less than a month before the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The Sunday Times reported that in Britain… , “Boris Johnson has been warned that … private polling and computer models shown to No 10 last month put Biden’s chances of victory at more than 70 per cent.”

That election was very heavily polled with hundreds of published polls, multiple aggregations and projections made public, and the latest news from the polls and models was a regular feature of news in countries worldwide. In that context, ‘private polling’ had nothing to add to what you could glean from reading the U.S. polling page on Wikipedia.

But ‘here are some exclusive private polls, Prime Minister’ certainly sounds more impressive than ‘here is a page printed from Wikipedia, Prime Minister’.

So what about that claim that internal polling shows the Conservatives doing much better on the economy than public polling?

There may be some genuine, high quality numbers behind it. But if they are, they’ve been heavily spun, because internal polling is really just the same as public polling - even often carried out by the same people, using the same panels. It’s just we don’t get all the details.

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National voting intention polls

Here’s the latest from each currently active pollster:

Deltapoll seems to be settling down alongside Opinium and Kantar as usually providing a Labour lead at the lower end of the range, while PeoplePolling is regularly the pollster finding the largest Labour lead.

It’s a large gap - between 21% and 30% - between the best and worst Conservative scores in the most recent polls. But as I’ve previously said, because those are all variations on disaster, that variation doesn’t matter so much. Moreover, previously when the polls have closed somewhat, that variation looks to have closed as well. So far, therefore, it’s a variation of interest to the nerds rather than one that alters the overall political story.

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

Last week’s edition

The public is more similar than you may think.

Know other people interested in political polling?

How much would Johnson replacing Sunak boost the Tories? Insights from this week’s polling…