On that Newsletter “Slugger O’Toole” poll…

For those of you wondering why we got ‘scooped’ on our own poll, as reported on the Newsletter this morning, it’s because it’s not actually our poll. We had been talking to Lucid Talk about running a depth poll in two key constituencies, rather than an 18 constituency wide survey. Bill White, former chair of South Belfast Ulster Unionist Association, who owns LucidTalk, explains below the fold:

LucidTalk were originally going to do 2 ‘Deep-Polls’ in two targeted Northern Ireland constituencies, however the time and cost constraints were too prohibitive. This is because ‘Deep-Polls’ are required if you target specific seats, in order to achieve the level of accuracy required to do a seat forecast, i.e. for each of these two seats.

Deep-Polls involve a sample size of 400 per seat, structured around 40 clusters across the targeted constituency thus providing a balanced socio-economic, and religious sample etc., which is representative of the constituency etc.

Due to the time constraints, LudidTalk had only 2 days to do this Poll, and as such, had to do/use the ‘Fast-Trak’ methodology of a Telephone poll, using a sample size of 360 across six N. Ireland constituencies.

As such, we carried out a six-constituency telephone poll with a sample size of 360 chosen from across these six constituencies. We then did a projection of this polling data across all 18 Westminster constituencies, and produced the results that are detailed in the report below:

Based on LucidTalks ‘6 constituency polling’, it suggests the current NI-wide ‘state of the parties’ is as follows:

DUP – 23.5%

UUP – 16.8%

PUP – 1.0%

TUV – 8.7%

SF – 26%

SDLP – 12.5%

Alliance – 8.5%

Green – 1.2%

Others – 1.8%

Of course, the point about regional variations is key, particularly in a Westminster election, and also the actual candidates standing, and how they’re viewed/perceived in each constituency is vitally important. In this context, the above NI wide polling estimations can only be treated as a crude guide.

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty