Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
No, they were when they were on the public spending pizza, but this is voter soup, which is quite different.
No, let's not go there.
So, you might just get a spoonful of mushrooms and you might miss the chickpeas, which have sunk to the bottom perhaps.
So, it's important to stir your soup well and get a sample that includes all the ingredients in proportion.
But even when you've got yourself a carefully selected sample spoonful that's representative, there's still room for error.
The pollsters generally say that 95% of the time, a poll of 1,000 people will have a margin of error of plus or minus 3%.
That means that a figure in the poll could be up to 3 percentage points higher or lower than shown, and that's the reason why different polls will show slightly different results, and their spoonful of voter soup is slightly different.
Yes, throughout the campaign, about 85 or 90% of UK polls, the vast majority, have shown there's between 0 and 2 percentage points between the two parties in the lead.
So that's where we're at, slap bang in the margin of error.
And that's one of the interesting things about this election.
The other is the fact that such a large number of people are saying they'll vote for a party other than the traditional big three, Conservative, Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
In the last election, 12% of people voted for a party other than those three.
This time, the polls suggest that figure could be at least double.
It is.
And one, actually, you might not at first notice looking at the UK polls if you just focus on the big two.
And there's another issue as well.
Taking a spoonful of UK voter soup...
is actually only of limited use when you've got such large regional and national differences as we do.
I mean, you only taste a bit of the Scottish broth that's gone into it, for example.
UK polls show only about 4% of the electorate think they'll vote for the SNP, but polls of Scotland show 40% to 50% of people, 10 times the proportion, saying they'll vote SNP, giving them a fairly consistent 24-point lead.
Showing 101–120 of 4,250 · page 6 of 213
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