Imagine watching a closely-fought Grand National on a wonky TV. Instead of seeing the horses move second by second, all you get are freeze-frame images every few hundred yards. You miss half the drama – the moment when one horse struggles at Bechers Brook, or another makes up ground on the flat.
Until this week, polls were like that. They provided occasional glimpses of the public mood, recording changes week by week or month by month, but missing the day by day ups-and-downs.
Now YouGov has launched the world’s first truly daily polling service for the media. Five times a week – and seven during the coming general election campaign – YouGov will report the voting intentions of around 1400 respondents and their views on topical issues. YouGov is teaming up with News International to provide this service. Our polls will be reported in The Sun from Tuesday to Friday, and in the Sunday Times each weekend.
Each day’s sample will be fresh: in the past, ‘daily’ polls in Britain and the US have questioned typically 250-350 people a day and combined data from three or four days to provide the published results. Each day, the oldest day’s data are removed, and the latest day’s data added. In contrast, each YouGov daily poll will report results gathered during a single 24-hour period.
YouGov’s daily polls will give us a ringside view of the Grand National of politics as it has never been viewed before. Expect daily fluctuations. That’s how real life is. Think not just of horse racing, but of the battle for soccer’s Premiership, or the fortunes of the stock market. It’s important to follow each match and each surge or retreat in share prices – but it’s also important to keep an eye on underlying trends. Like a 100 pt rise or fall in the FTSE index, a 2-point movement in a poll is worth reporting at the time – but often we can’t tell for a few days whether it’s a blip or a trend.
Day by day, we shall follow the fortunes of the parties in virtually real time. As the coming contest unfolds, we shall report not only the daily drama but the trends that will shape the final outcome.
This is how it will work. Voting intentions and a rotating series of political tracker questions will be put to the full 1400 sample between 5pm one day and 5pm the following day. In addition, the Sun surveys will contain two topical questions, decided each morning and out to 800 respondents between 10am and 5pm. This will enable YouGov to test public attitudes to breaking news, and the Sun to report them, within 24 hours.
In the nineteenth century, the electric telegraph transformed newsgathering. Instead of using carrier pigeons to bring news – a process that could take days – London newsdesks could learn what was happening around the world on the same day. We believe that YouGov’s new service is the polling equivalent of this transformation – and that, like the pigeon-post more than a century ago, the days of pigeon-polls are numbered.
