It’s tempting to think that fast means dirty. Polling on Findoutnow.co.uk is very fast, but it’s also very accurate. To put this to the test, we asked Martin Baxter of Electoral Calculus to conduct a Westminster voting intention poll to compare with their recent Poll of Polls. How did we do?

On Tuesday the 2nd of February we asked a broadly representative sample of 5,002 respondents “If there was a General Election tomorrow, which party, if any, would you vote for?”. Find Out Now holds extensive profile data so we were able to send Martin complete (non-personally identifiable) respondent data including geographical, demographic and voting history information.

Martin performed regression analysis on the data and compared it with an average of recent polls by other pollsters, the public monthly poll-of-polls by Electoral Calculus for January. It uses six pollsters with fieldwork from 21-Jan to 29-Jan and a total sample size of 10,525.

The results of the analysis, in terms of predicted national (GB) vote share for the major parties is given in the table below:

Party	Electoral Calculus Poll of Polls	Find Out Now
CON	40%	39%
LAB	38%	38%
LIB	7%	7%
Reform	2%	3%
Green	4%	6%
SNP+Plaid Cymru	5%	6%
Other	4%	1%

Martin concluded that the results for the three big parties were in line with other polling organisations. The number of voters assigned to minor parties (Reform, Green) is slightly high, though this is balanced by fewer voters in the “Other” category. In his words:

“Find Out Now delivered professional-quality polling data very quickly which was well-suited to modern regression methods and which produced voting intention figures entirely consistent with recent poll-of-polls.”

Martin Baxter, Electoral Calculus

Working with Martin was a pleasure, and we hope to be collaborating again with him soon.

Data tables can be downloaded here

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash