EU referendum held in 3 constituencies & 80% vote to leave

In the biggest vote or poll since 1975 an EU referendum was held in 3 constituencies with almost 15,000 votes. 80% voted to leave the EU.

Thoughts? Is this an indication of what could happen in a nationwide vote, will it add pressure to David Cameron to hold a vote sooner?

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/553241/80-per-cent-Britons-leave-EU-poll-reveal

I expect lots of people who aren’t familiar with how polling works will see a claim like this, see that 14,000 took part, and think it must therefore be meaningful (in the same way, a naive criticism of polls is often that they only interview 1000 people). The best example of why this doesn’t work was the polling for the 1936 Presidential election in the USA, which heralded modern polling and tested big sample sizes to destruction. Back then the most well known poll was that done by a magazine, the Literary Digest. The Literary Digest too sent out ballot papers to as many people as it could – it sent them to its subscribers, to other subscription lists, to everyone in the phone directory, to everyone with a car, etc, etc. In 1936 it sent out 10 million ballot papers and received two point four million responses. Based on these replies, they confidently predicted that the Republican candidate Alf Landon would win the election. Meanwhile the then little known George Gallup interviewed just a few thousand people, but using proper demographic quotas to get a sample that was representative of the American public. Gallup’s data predicted a landslide win for the Democrat candidate Franklin D Roosevelt. Gallup was of course right, the Literary Digest embarrassingly wrong. The reason was that the Literary Digest’s huge sample of 2.4 million was drawn from the sort of people who had telephones, cars and magazine subscriptions and, in depression era America, these people voted Republican.

Coming back to the Express’s “poll”, a campaign about leaving Europe run by three Tory election candidates in the East Midlands is likely to largely be responded to by Conservative sympathisers with strong views about Europe, hence the result. Luckily we have lots of properly conducted polls that are sampled and weighted to be representative of whole British public and they consistently show a different picture. There are some differences between different companies – YouGov ask it a couple of time a month and find support for leaving the EU varying between 37% and 44%, Survation asked a couple of months ago and found support for leaving at 47%, Opinium have shown it as high as 48%. For those still entranced by large sample sizes, Lord Ashcroft did a poll of 20,000 people on the subject of Europe last year (strangely larger than the Express’s “largest poll for 40 years”!) and found people splitting down the middle 41% stay – 41% leave.