Reasons not to extrapolate from Rochdale to the country
This poll result rather puts into context how much wider significance can be drawn from George Galloway’s win in the Rochdale by-election:
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This poll result rather puts into context how much wider significance can be drawn from George Galloway’s win in the Rochdale by-election:
I am chair of the Dewsbury and Batley branch of Kirklees Constituency Party Lib Dems. The point is not how popular George Galloway is but how deeply unpopular Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is. amongst Muslim communities. Starmer’s failure to support a cease fire in Gaza is deeply unpopular and I suspect the only way Labour can recover substantative support is with a new leader. This unpopularity will affect the Labour vote in the local elections this May.
I would question the validity of this poll. It appears on YouGov in a section called ‘daily questions’. That is an add-on survey that you are invited to take after you have completed a regular YouGov survey, as I had when I encountered it. Because it is an add-on it is not weighted and appears to be open to everyone on the panel. Therefore it can’t possibly be an accurate reflection of public opinion and is probably only about as reliable as a typical Twitter poll.
Dawud – as far as I know, the published results like this are weighted accordingly and so are representative (unlike the live figures that YouGov has for some questions to which it attaches a warning about representativeness).