SCOT goes POP!: “ICM poll confirms that a brilliant Alex Salmond stormed to a decisive win in tonights crucial TV debate” plus 1 more ICM poll confirms that a brilliant Alex Salmond stormed to a decisive win in tonights crucial TV debate Posted: 25 Aug 2014 08:48 PM PDT The results of ICMs instant post-debate poll are as follows : As far as you are concerned which one of the two leaders do you think won the debate? Alex Salmond 71% Alistair Darling 29% There were red faces at both the BBC and the Guardian tonight, as the disconnect between the above numbers and the initial spin that both organisations attempted to place on the debate illustrated vividly just how out of touch they often are with the instincts and concerns of the electorate in Scotland. Andrew Sparrow of the Guardian hilariously called it a draw (yeah, that Brazil v Germany match was pretty close as well, wasnt it, Andrew?), while Allan Little of the BBC bizarrely observed that this debate was much closer than the previous one. Thankfully, good old Brian Taylor partly saved the day for the BBC by popping up afterwards to insert a dose of realism, and to declare that Alex Salmond would be the happier of the two men. I probably shouldnt be too hard on Allan Little, who has consistently been the best and most even-handed BBC network reporter on the referendum. But just to emphasise how absurd the much closer claim is, the ICM poll after the first debate gave Alistair Darling a mere 12% advantage, which wasnt all that far outside the standard margin of error (and was probably inside the real world margin of error, given the severe upweighting of some groups of respondents). Tonights ICM poll gives Alex Salmond the win by a whopping 42% margin. Would it have been better for Yes if Salmond could have produced these kind of dream numbers in both debates? Perhaps, but theres also a lot to be said for being on the right side of a comeback kid narrative, and if any of us had to choose which of the two debates wed rather have seen result in a clear Salmond win, it would undoubtedly have been this one, with postal votes just about to be sent out. If the poll results had been slightly closer, I have no doubt that the unionist media would have attempted to maintain the risible line of it was a draw. As it is, theyll be unable to completely ignore the elephant in the room, although I suspect their back-up argument will be Salmond won, but it doesnt really matter. To be fair, they can pray in aid the fact that ICM have before-and-after numbers for voting intentions, which on the face of it suggest that Salmonds win had only a minimal impact - Should Scotland be an independent country? (Post-debate figures, with changes from pre-debate figures in brackets) Yes 49.5% (+0.6) No 50.5% (-0.6) However, exactly the same thing happened in ICMs instant poll after the first debate, and yet the majority of the polls since then have shown movement (mostly towards Yes). So the true impact may not become clear until voters have had a chance to reflect on the debate, talk about it with family and friends, and digest the media spin on it - which ironically will be largely driven by the ICM poll itself. And it should also be remembered that ICMs respondents may have wanted to avoid looking fickle by admitting that the debate had directly changed their voting intention. Now. Ahem. Youll probably have noticed that, regardless of the fact that they didnt alter much after the debate, the voting intention numbers listed above are rather wonderful for Yes. Should we be excited? Only up to a point, because ICM have once again been at pains to point out that this is not a normal representative poll, and was by definition restricted to people who were planning to (and who actually did) watch the debate. Nevertheless, the results were still weighted to reflect the demographic profile of the Scottish population, so what weve ended up with is a curious half-breed poll, which doesnt attempt to directly reflect either the population as a whole or just the fraction of the population that watched the debate, but instead aims to artificially hover somewhere in between those two possibilities, which youd think really ought to be mutually exclusive. So although the voting intention numbers cant be regarded as fully reliable, they shouldnt be dismissed out of hand either. At the very least, we can certainly use them to help measure how opinion has changed between the two debates, because ICM performed exactly the same exercise last time around. On the pre-debate figures, these are the changes since the 5th of August - Yes 48.9% (+2.0) No 51.1% (-2.0) And on the post-debate figures... Yes 49.5% (+2.7) No 50.5% (-2.7) Although the swing to Yes is within the margin of error, its entirely consistent with what weve been seeing in the last three proper polls, from ICM, YouGov and Panelbase respectively. And so much for Salmonds much-vaunted woman problem, by the way. ICM found that female watchers of the debate were significantly more likely than men to say that Salmond had a more appealing personality than Darling, and had the better arguments. Having said that, both genders agreed that Salmond won on those counts. Isnt it hard not being independent? If you want to build something, you cant build? Posted: 25 Aug 2014 11:26 AM PDT I dont know what it is about the London to Glasgow night bus, but every time Im on it I seem to find myself sitting either behind or in front of two people who are complete strangers to each other, but who strike up an instant friendship and talk for hours and hours. Last night, it was a young English woman studying at Dundee University, and a man from distant shores who has been in the UK for five years, and who was travelling to Scotland for the first time as an adventure, because its too much hassle getting a visa for other European countries. He knew very little about Scotland, and bombarded the woman with questions about what the country is like and how its governed. He seemed a bit perplexed to discover that our taxes still go direct to London, and ruefully told her that Britain had treated his own country in much the same way for two hundred years. No, no, no, she protested, its not like that at all, Scotland isnt exploited like an old British colony, because all the money is spread out fairly throughout the UK. But he was still confused, and asked her : Isnt it hard not being independent? If you want to build something, you cant build? It just goes to show that it often takes a complete outsider to find true perspective on what is at stake. * * * Now that Im home, Ive finally had a chance to look at the datasets from the bizarre Sunday Post poll of over-60s. Its not possible to make a direct comparison between the headline numbers of this poll and the equivalent age-specific results from previous Survation polls, because breakdowns are usually only given for 55-64s and over-65s. However, if we look at over-65s only, one thing that leaps out at me is that the Yes/No split with Dont Knows excluded is absolutely identical to the numbers for the same age group in the Survation poll from July, which of course showed the Yes campaign just five points behind among the whole sample. The No lead in this poll (with DKs excluded) is also only 2% higher than in the over-65s results from the June poll, which similarly showed a 5% gap on the headline numbers. Theres not a huge amount that we can read into yet another poll of a conveniently No-friendly demographic group, but we can at least be reassured that the results are perfectly consistent with a very low No lead. And dont worry - the unionist media havent exhausted all of the imaginative possibilities yet. Coming soon : did members of the Orange Order think Alex Salmond won tonights debate? Check out tomorrows Daily Mail for an exclusive YouGov poll! * * * While I was travelling, I couldnt work out how to embed the Phantom Power video that I took part in, so here it is now -
Posted on: Tue, 26 Aug 2014 12:10:45 +0000
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