EU: Polls and taboos
So what do the polls today by Survation and ICM tell us? Is this the moment the Leave camp pulled level?
Survation already had Leave ahead of Remain in 2 previous polls. ICM has Remain slightly lower than they’ve had them recently but still slightly ahead.
It looks in the poll of polls as though the lines have narrowed since the start of the Autumn, but some think that could be a function of who has been polling and how they’ve been polling.
Internet polls (in general) tended to over-state the eventual UKIP vote in the election, phone polls slightly under-stated it. You can see a read-across in how they are each estimating the Leave vote in recent months. You can read John Curtice’s analysis from last month here.
The “Don’t Knows” amount to, on average, 17 per cent of the sample. They aren’t all “Don’t Votes.” If they break in favour of the status quo then the Remain side will breath a sigh of relief.
But one of the lessons of Scotland is that this isn’t just about how the “Don’t Knows” break. In Scotland, the polls narrowed because people who’d said they would vote “No” ended up voting “Yes.”
Another point to make about Scotland is that the winning “Yes” campaign was much further ahead this far off the actual poll.
One thing people say on both sides of the argument is that the moment the renegotiation is landed is critical to the outcome of the result. David Cameron needs to bring Conservative supporters with him to win the referendum. Critical to that, many think, is how the Tory big beasts jump on Europe.
If Boris Johnson and Theresa May both went to the Leave camp it could lend real credibility to that side and tear away a huge chunk of Tory support. Holding the Tory Party to his side of the argument as he brings home his renegotiation is central to David Cameron’s task.
The atmospherics around the renegotiation are critical. Just as Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan in 1974 confected a bit of sharp language and a row to kick off the first full encounter, so David Cameron needs a sense of conflict to make doubters convinced he’s won something worthwhile.
The tone of European Council President, Donald Tusk’s letter just sent to EU leaders ahead of the Thursday/Friday summit might help. He writes:
“We are still far from an agreement on several topics. This Thursday we will need to focus especially on the most controversial ones. The stakes are so high that we cannot escape a serious debate with no taboos.”
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