Brexit now leading by 10 points

UK Independent article

EU Referendum: Massive swing to Brexit – with just 12 days to go

Exclusive: polling carried out for ‘The Independent’ shows that 55 per cent of UK voters intend to vote for Britain to leave the EU in the 23 June referendum

The campaign to take Britain out of the EU has opened up a remarkable 10-point lead over the Remain camp, according to an exclusive poll for The Independent.

The survey of 2,000 people by ORB found that 55 per cent believe the UK should leave the EU (up four points since our last poll in April), while 45 per cent want it to remain (down four points). These figures are weighted to take account of people’s likelihood to vote. It is by far the biggest lead the Leave camp has enjoyed since ORB began polling the EU issue for The Independent a year ago, when it was Remain who enjoyed a 10-point lead. Now the tables have turned.​

Remember back in April when Brexit was trailing and Obama went over there and told the British that they'd go to "the back of the queue" if they left the EU, and that any trade deals between Britain and the US could take 10 years to negotiate? Yeah, good times.

Can anyone summarize the potential positive and negative effects both immediate and long term if the British leave the European Union?

Could the EU survive the withdrawal of their second largest nation and second largest economy. And a bigger issue, largest military.

I find that disappointing. I would rather the UK make use of their opt out but maintain a loose affiliation.

gturner's pro Brexit?
I'm so shocked.
Look, this is my shocked face.

If Britain leaves the EU they'll be able to preserve their language and the British way of life, along with their gardens, museums, and history.

If they stay they'll all have to learn Arabic, then get replaced by robots, then get conquered by robots that converted to Islam, and then they'll undergo mass sterilization as superfluous oxygen-depleting heretical CO2 producers, and they'll disappear into the dustbin of history as one of Earth's failed experiments.

A loose afflitaion would require a substantial renegotiation, which is unlikely to happen.

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How accurate are the Brexit polls?
John Burn-Murdoch

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After failing to predict the 2015 election, the polling industry still has questions to resolve
©PA
D
ays away from Britain’s historic EU referendum, opinion polls are dominating the debate, ramping up uncertainty about the eventual outcome.

The problem is no one knows how much to trust such surveys.

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A week ago, the campaign to remain in the bloc was relatively confident, buoyed by a series of polling leads; since then the Leave camp has pulled ahead in some polls.

But whether such changes are due to genuine shifts in public opinion or to the failings of an industry in crisis is a subject of intense debate.

Pollsters’ inability to predict the Conservative overall majority in the UK’s 2015 general election was just the highest profile recent mishap in countries ranging from Canada to Israel and Turkey.

Even as the June 23 referendum approaches, the industry has still to resolve big questions over the disparities between telephone and internet research and assessing people’s likelihood of voting. But alternative forms of prediction have problems of their own.

Online vs Telephone
In telephone interviews, respondents are asked whether the UK should remain part of the EU or leave. They can say they don’t know or would prefer not to say (PNTS), but since neither of these responses is explicitly stated as part of the question, there is an invisible nudge to lean one way or the other.

Online, the alternative options have to be explicitly included in the poll as it appears on screen, meaning the tentative Remains and Leaves of the telephone poll often turn into more comfortable Don’t Knows or PNTSs.

There is no intent to elicit different responses, but this appears to be what has been happening.

Online only, Remain and Leave have remained largely neck-and-neck throughout 2016. Small shifts either way are probably noise rather than signal.


Telephone only, Remain has held a solid lead over Leave throughout 2016. The margin tightened in the first three months of the year, but since mid-April has been largely unchanged


Why would Remain appear to benefit from a methodological issue concerning undecided voters? The accepted wisdom is that when respondents feel that invisible nudge to go one way or the other, they are most likely to opt for the familiarity of the status quo.

Essentially this creates two distinct data series. Unsurprisingly, increasing the frequency of telephone polls shifts the average towards Remain.

Between May 15 and 24, six out of 10 polls were carried out by telephone and Remain’s average lead widened accordingly. Some misinterpreted this as a fundamental shift indicative of changing or settling opinions among the electorate, but the movement within polls of each mode was minimal.

Polls of polls
Such factors have consequences for polls of polls, such as the Financial Times’ Brexit poll tracker.

The methodology for our poll tracker is straightforward. We take the seven most recent polls from seven different pollsters, remove outliers by dropping the poll with the highest share for Remain and the one with the lowest, and adjust for how recent the data were.

One question we are considering is whether to balance the results between telephone and online polls — which are more frequent because they are cheaper and easier to carry out, and which therefore outweigh telephone surveys.

Likelihood to vote
The online versus telephone polling problem is the most visible challenge pollsters have faced, but far from the only one. Another issue concerns likelihood of voting. This is a longer-running concern and one all pollsters adjust for, but these adjustments are far from an exact science: many different solutions are used.

Some pollsters only include answers from respondents who declare themselves certain to vote in the referendum, others weight the responses according to where respondents place themselves on a likelihood scale from 1 to 10, and others exclude anyone who puts themselves as less than 50 per cent likely to vote.

Our own analysis of the last five polls from pollsters who publish respondents’ likelihood of voting on such a scale shows how the different approaches can affect the numbers. Generally the more certain someone is that they will vote in the referendum, the more likely they are to respond “Leave”. Leave consistently does best when only those absolutely certain to vote are counted.


But in most cases Remain wins out among those saying they are 80 or 90 per cent certain of voting, so it is not as simple as saying Leave supporters are more likely to vote. Turnout is more likely to split down traditional demographic lines, which are finely balanced, with Leave-favouring over-50s and Remain-favouring ABC1 social grades both typically high turnout groups.

Herding
Another factor sometimes behind pollsters’ methodological tweaks is an effort to minimise the distance between their polls’ results and the perceived “true” state of the electorate’s opinion. This attempt to position a poll in the middle of the pack is known as “herding”.

A convergence of the Remain and Leave numbers — consistent with what would result from herding — has been identified in EU referendum polls over the past year by Professors Patrick Sturgis and Will Jennings, both of whom contributed to the inquiry into polling ahead of the 2015 general election.

The betting markets
With so many problems afflicting the polls, some suggest turning to the betting markets instead. The argument is that a prediction made in the hope of earning a reward will be a good indicator of the way things will go.

There are problems here, too. Most obviously, much of the money that moves the betting markets will have been placed with the polls as a guide.

We can see this at work in what happened to the betting markets during the lead-up to the general election in May 2015.

Based on the average odds across mainstream bookmakers, the Conservatives began to open up a lead in February 2015 over Labour in terms of implied likelihood of being the party with the most seats, but the gap didn’t become a yawning gulf until only the final fortnight before election day.


Even then, just five days before polls opened, odds in a separate market implied a 91 per cent probability of there being no overall majority in the House of Commons. Six days later the Tories had won 330 of the 650 seats — a narrow overall majority but an overall majority nonetheless.

At the time of writing, the odds imply a 72 per cent chance of Remain winning the day. In short, the bookies are confident that the UK will remain part of the EU, but less confident than they were that there would be no overall majority last May.


Related Topics

• UK's EU referendum,
• European Union

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Will they be able to keep their tea and crumpets as well?

It certainly gives me reason to reconsider my slight lean toward Brexit, or more accurately toward the looser affiliation Dinner describes. If gturner is for something, it's probably best to be against it.

You bet, DanLea.

no u

Also, superfluous apostrophes.

What's the immediate impetus here, and is there a larger issue at stake? 'Fraid I don't know much about this topic.

If there's one thing we have learned from elections and referenda in the past years it's that polling will be off by far. I don't know why they even still do it, it's become useless.

Needless to say I hope the Brits stay in. If not, the EU will of course survive (-exits are in the bloody rules!) But the UK will find out what lying weasels the likes of Farage really are - the hard way. That kind just wants little isolated fiefdoms because they think they can have more power. And so they lie, lie and lie some more.

From what I've read, the EU might be OK but could suffer a ripple effect. The UK economy will decline over the next several years following the exit, but could ultimately stabilize.

The biggest winner in all of this will probably be the US and China, honestly.

The problem is that the EU has expanded too quickly in the 2000s. This was done out of strategic interests. Personally I think there should have been more integration first, expansion later. Could have done that easily 15 years ago. Now, not so much.

The future will probably bring a 2- or even 3-tiered EU. A core that integrates faster (Germany, Austria, Benelux, maybe France and/or Italy). A second tier would be all the Eastern European states that can't keep up now. And maybe number 3 might be the Club Med. Although I don't think Spain and Italy would want to belong to the same club as Greece. Where would the UK fit in? I don't know. While there are 28 squabbling member states, the Brits are their very own thing.

As for the ripple effect... nah. If the UK votes for Brexit, the EU will play hardball. It's one of the Leave camp's grand lies that they'd have all the goodies without any obligations. For example, there is no access to the common market without free movement of persons. This is not negotiable, just as it wasn't for Switzerland. The UK might even be forced to join the Schengen Agreement if they want access just as the Swiss were.

The UK is welcome to join the United States if this Europe thing doesn't work out.

I'd emigrate to Paris.

You would rather join the French that the United States?

Yes.

Why? According to noted historian Niall Ferguson France is a lost cause.

Well, it's not so much France per se, as "not America". Norway, for instance, would be somewhere I could imagine living.

As much as I enjoy traveling to America I wouldn't want to live there full time. At risk of being offensive, but honest, I must say the older I get the more I find your culture a little too loud, vulgar and immature for my liking, for various reasons. It's not that that I dislike America and I can enjoy it in limited amounts, but I think it would frustrate me if I had to live around that sort of culture permanently. Probably the only exception would be if I were to consider living in a major cosmopolitan American city like NYC, which would be far more in tune with Britain and Europe culturally than much of the rest of the country. In contrast I find much of Europe to be more culturally in line with myself and the less bombastic and more calm nature of most European countries appeals to me more the older I get. Also, I'm used to having so many countries and cultures on my doorstep.

Obviously, I'd always choose the US over living somewhere like, say, Japan or Russia, because of the overall cultural similarities, but it's simply not on the top of my list. I feel marginally more European than I do American. If I were 15 years younger I would have chosen the US first, but people change as they get older.

More than a few people get more conservative as they get older.

And I don't know where you have been in the U.S. where its more "bombastic" than New York City.

I don't think you understand what I mean by bombastic, which I don't blame you for since you don't have experience of other cultures so the parameters for your judgment are different.

The immediate impetus is a mixture of rising nationalism and xenophobia along with economic struggles and disagreements throughout Europe, as far as I can tell. However, the greater issue, I am afraid, is that European unification never had a legitimate democratic mandate. Note that I am very much in its favour, so I hate to say this. But as a matter of historical fact, hardly any part of the population was ever truly asked if they wanted in. Ask them if they want out, they'll remember that and are likely to say yes.

As a still larger issue, I am convinced we are dealing with a Sun During Daytime effect. The true advantages of the EU are about keeping peace in Europe. But we have been so successful in doing so that people no longer realise that we needed a supernational structure to force us. They're pointing at the Sun and saying, "Too bad that ball of flaming gas is only there during the day, when it's light out anyway! If we had it in the night time, then it'd be worthwhile!"

You mean because it alternates between smelling like urine and feces?

I'll move to Israel.

What makes you think the European Union has had anything to do with keeping peace in Europe?

I would say it is NATO more than any other factor.