Scot Goes Pop

a tool of the anti-independence establishment?

by James Kelly

The assumption presumably had been that Panelbase were only showing relatively Yesfriendly results because they were some sort of fly-bynight outfit, and that the grown-ups at ICM were bound to corroborate the more sensible results produced by the other grownups at Ipsos-Mori and YouGov

IN THE EARLY part of the long campaign for the 2014 independence referendum, by which I mostly mean the calendar year of 2013, there was a perception that the polling situation was unremittingly bleak for the Yes campaign, except in Panelbase polls. Non-Panelbase polls, which mainly came from Ipsos-Mori, YouGov, and TNS, generally suggested the contest was over before it had really started, with seemingly insurmountable No leads that occasionally touched a 2-1 margin. Even Panelbase usually reported a significant No lead of around ten points (except in one poll with an outright Yes lead that used a non-standard question sequence). So the brutal choice for independence supporters seemed to be to either place somewhat questionable faith in the outlier polling company, in which case Yes had a mountain to climb, or to believe in the general consensus of the bulk of polling firms, in which case there was little point in Yes campaigners even getting out of bed in the morning.

In retrospect, though, it seems likely that this perception was illusory, and that Panelbase’s seemingly ‘rogue’ results were actually part of a ‘hidden norm’ of online polling. Even during 2013, there were one or two clues that we perhaps should have picked up on - there were a couple of online polls from the Canadian firm Angus Reid which were not exactly healthy for Yes, but nevertheless suggested a No lead considerably smaller than most firms were reporting. Those polls were generally discounted because of Angus Reid’s small sample size, and lack of experience in this country. But then in the very first month of 2014, the campaign was electrified by an online poll from ICM, widely regarded at the time as the UK’s “gold standard” pollster, which showed Yes just seven percentage points behind, with eight months of campaigning still to go.