After the Sun on Sunday's DeltaPoll at the weekend, there comes new polling from BMG, which totally contradicts it (HERE). The Sun's polling, which came from a new polling company was slightly dodgy anyway, and was totally against the results of much bigger, more accurate polls by established players like YouGov and ComRes.
But then this is exactly what The Sun intended isn't it? To push back against the idea that the public is going soft on Brexit with a spoiling poll of their own. To muddy as much water as they could.
For months and months pollsters produce survey after survey to show that public sentiment and opinion is shifting slowly and inexorably away from Brexit. There is no mistaking the trend even if you fundamentally doubt the accuracy of polls. They might be wrong but you cannot argue with the clear and obvious trend. What you can't do is to pick one very dodgy poll, by a new company and proclaim it's accurate when you haven't mentioned any of the dozens of polls indicating the opposite.
But this is precisely what The Telegraph and Robbie, a Downing Street Director of Communication try to do HERE.
The Sun on Sunday poll by DeltaPoll, seems to go entirely against the trend but gets front page treatment in the Telegraph. And the question that gets the headline is very odd. It asks: Should we just leave next March as planned? There is only three possible responses to this question and they are given as Yes 47%, No 28% and don't know 8%. But eagle-eyed people will note this only adds up to 83%! What happened to the other 17%? It's a dodgy poll interpreted dodgiliy.
However, 24 hours later, BMG publish a poll showing 54% now support remaining while leave is down at 46%. These are even more emphatic than those from YouGov and ComRes. The 8% gap is the largest I've seen, although I note BMG say they had one poll last December, when it seemed no agreement might be reached, which had a 10% lead for Remain.
I don't think there is now a single polling organisation that does not accept the solid trend to Remain. As BMG say:
"It is important to note that whilst the proportion who say that they support leaving has trailed consistently since the turn of the year, it also has been resolutely consistent. Leave support is currently 43%, which is only three points below the 46% support it achieved in November 2016, a time when the Leave-side was routinely recording marginal leads over Remainers".
But, and this is a significant but, BMG also confirm what others have found. That people are not actually changing their mind, or almost as many remain voters in 2016 are switching as leaver voters. So where is the increase in the Remain vote coming? BMG explain how this is happening, and it echoes what professor John Curtice has previously said. BMG say:
"This would suggest that the Remain lead has not come from ‘switchers’ – those that voted to Leave in 2016 but have now changed their mind – instead the current Remain lead appears to come from those who did not vote in 2016 and those who don’t tend to vote in general. It has also come from those who were unsure post-referendum".
"As Remain support has risen, the number of respondents who said that they don’t know has dropped. In November 2016 14% of Briton’s said that they were unsure, which is double the figure that said they were unsure this month (7%)".
"The trend described above is confirmed when we dig a little deep into the figures. Consistent with our findings over the last two years, we find around nine in ten of those who voted both Remain and Leave in 2016 would still vote the same way. No minds changed there then. However, those who stayed at home in 2016 say that they are overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in the EU. 67% of those that did not vote in 2016 say they support remaining, with just 22% saying they would vote to leave".
So we are picking up the vote of the undecided and unsure and also those who did not vote previously and this is, I think, obviously where the first changes of mind would come. But BMG are not optimistic about the swing changing the result of any new referendum:
"With record turnout at the EU Referendum in 2016, and little-to-no evidence that turnout would rise dramatically for a ‘people’s vote’ (or at least that traditional non-voters are very unlikely to turn out in large numbers), the polling suggests that another referendum on EU membership, asked in exactly the same way, is most likely to produce the same result, not a different one."
I think this is quite pessimistic for several reasons. Firstly it doesn't take account of the demographics as younger pro-EU voters join the electorate and older anti-EU voters leave it. Secondly, other polling shows many older voters who supported Brexit would not vote again even if they could, perhaps recognising Brexit is far more complex that they first thought. And when it looked as if no agreement was going to be reached in December, the Remain vote spiked. As the problems of Brexit become clearer I am convinced others will change their mind too.
Finally, what nobody has been able to show and nobody has claimed (except for Robbie Gibb above), as far as I'm aware, is that support for Brexit is rising. It is not, it is falling all the time.
