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Don't want to put a dampener on your euphoria, but this would drive people up the wall. The minuscule changes from day to day would become an irrelevance to the masses, and hyper-anorak time for the politicos. Changes can and do manifest themselves monthly, even weekly, but daily? Who cares if Prescott's approval is 14% on Monday, 14.3% on Tuesday, and 15% on Wednesday? Daily polling will take the 'news' out of significant changes. Everything will be incremental.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn.

Understandable reaction, Nadim, and I would agree if that were point. But it's not daily incremental change that we want to highlight - rather two quite different things:

1) Immediate measurement of change when there IS significant change

2) Seeing the overall pattern - occasional snapshots can't do that so well.

For example, when did Cameron's ratings really change? The daily picture shows it was the halo effect of being seen as a winner after the local election results, not the local election campaign itself.

And we've had a lot of specualtion lately about whether Cameron is waning - but our figures show that the upward shift is, for the moment at least, sustaining itself quite firmly.

We see Patricia Hewitt recovering from her sudden drop, but Charles Clarke staying down up until his dismissal.

God help us! Endlessly watching a shopping channel fronted by a big brother contestant painting a wall would be more preferable!

The June ICM Poll for the Guardian is out as well:

Con 37 (-1)
Lab 32 (-2)
LD 21 (+1)

The availability of this information can only be helpful, surely? Yes, most people won't be interested (most people aren't interested in Bloomberg either) but those of us who are will find it fascinating and, in a political context, very useful.


Couldn't agree more with Donal. It really won't be the stuff of daily political news but more a tool for those actively engaged in politics to track the relationship between events and reactions.

The danger of daily polling would be that party news managers would be tempted to believe they could accurately judge the effect or popularity of a policy by looking at the immediate reaction to it in the polls. People’s perceptions of parties changes more slowly than that. Labours deserved reputation for spendthrift incompetence has taken years to build, which is lucky for us, as with such foundations, it is going to be near impossible to reverse.

Political anoraks (in which I include myself) may well like daily polling, but let’s be well aware of the limitations of what it might be telling us.

Perhaps if they just limited the daily polls to particular websites those of us sad enough to be interested could stare at them until our heart's content.

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