Petition to revoke Article 50 ...
Re: Petition to revoke Article 50 ...
No Devil, I have not got my head in the clouds, polls prove absolutely nothing, and they never have.
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.
Re: Petition to revoke Article 50 ...
The pollsters usually take from 1000 to 5000, sometimes more, chosen as a representative cross-section of different sectors of the community in different parts of the country. When you average the results of 60 odd independent polls, you can be pretty sure that they are reasonably accurate in terms of what people are thinking at the moment that the poll is taken. Another problem with polls is with how the questions are worded. It is very difficult to make the questions absolutely neutral and professional pollsters are aware of the problem and do their best to ensure absolute neutrality. So, I am reasonably confident that with, say, a total of 100,000 respondents over 60-odd polls, the answer must be reasonably accurate and certainly better than 1 percent error margin. With a single poll, such as conducted by a newspaper, I would not be so confident.