My election notes. E-Day – 32

by Pseud O'Nym

 

Another day, another poll suggesting that something might happen to someone, whereas something else might happen if that someone does something different because some people are feeling something that they could well change their minds about.  Or something.

Yup, there’s another poll in today’s Observer, carried out by Opinium, which states;

The Tories have dropped one point to 46% since last week, while Labour is unchanged on 30%. The Liberal Democrats are up one point on 9% and Ukip is unchanged on 7%.

While Labour has succeeded in clawing back some of the Tory lead, which stood at 19 points two weeks ago, Theresa May’s party would still win a majority of 100.

Oh dear. Someone, somewhere is doing something – but hang on! There’s a caveat here. A small glimmer of hope! The report adds, in something akin to what I imagine would be a schoolboy’s voice when offering a grudgingly mumbled apology, whilst looking downward and kicking his shoes;

if this weekend’s figures are an accurate prediction of what happens on polling day.

What! You mean to say this poll could be wrong? Next thing is you’ll be telling me that they base their findings from a survey of only 20005 people. Oh that’s in the small print is it? Along with the fact that respondents took part online. Well that’s fair enough, I suppose, everything’s done online nowadays. What with it being more modern than a bloke with a clipboard. At least they weren’t paid to take part – oh they were?

But that wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the story. I had to go their website to discover that rather salient fact.

You get cash rewards for each survey that you complete. The average payment is 50p and we pay you when your account reaches twenty five pounds.

Admittedly, one doesn’t get much but that isn’t the point. The point is that not just a only a sad sack like me would think it worth asking to question the survey’s methodology, but also that for a newspaper that frequently takes the moral high ground, isn’t this just a tiny bit something?