Brexit Or Remain: approaching the final furlong
The impending EU referendum, and the possibility of a Brexit, have dominated the news for what feels like months, despite indications that many people are fed up with it. Recent polling and focus groups suggest that the increasingly impenetrable soup of horror stories, utopian promises and questionable statistics, which has characterised the campaign, is a significant source of frustration to voters who just want to be told “straight facts”.
But, good information or not, voters will make up their minds. And it’s supposed to be the job of opinion pollsters to tell us which way they’ll go. So what are they saying? Well, as the debate enters its final fortnight, the figures paint a mixed picture.
Two phone polls published last week showed a significant movement towards a Leave vote (one put Brexit support at 52%), bucking the general trend. But this can probably be cautiously explained by the fact the surveys were carried out over a bank holiday weekend, when the younger and more affluent demographic, which is most likely to back Remain, was away from home and unable to pick up the phone.
Meanwhile running poll aggregators such as this one from the Economist have, most of the time since the campaign started, suggested Remain has a small lead. The betting markets, too, indicate that a vote to stay is the most likely outcome.
But the picture is complicated. Online there has been a lively discussion going on between data wonks over the different results returned by telephone and internet polls: the former tend to show Remain comfortably in front, while the latter point to the race being neck-and-neck.
This disparity could be because internet polls are based on self-selecting and therefore unrepresentative samples, giving results that disproportionately reflect the views of the politically engaged. Phone polls, on the other hand, may reach more realistic numbers of undecided voters and thus paint a more accurate picture of the national mood. But “could” and “may” are important words here – it might be that both types are wrong, albeit in different ways.
What we do know is that opinion polls have generally overstated the support for change in the run-ups to past referendums in Britain. And undecided voters tend to plump for the status quo once they are actually inside the polling booth. All of this is good news for Remain and bad news for the Brexiteers. But as we have seen in recent years, history can be a poor guide to current political trends. Despite the efforts of David Cameron, Brexit is still very much in the running.