A YouGov poll of a thousand Conservative Party members is in today’s Observer.
The Observer‘s poll is the first to seek the views of Party members about the next Tory leader since the election. These are early days. But, on these findings, those curious to know who will succeed Theresa May should scrap the expensive commissioning of polls – and simply read the ConHome survey each month, which they can do for free.
As readers will already have clocked, the two sets of findings mirror each other very closely indeed. The Observer doesn’t seem to have published a full table of results but, according to its report, YouGov asked respondents “to nominate their preferred candidate”. We presented readers with a list of possible candidates and a write-in option for others.
YouGov’s approach has its pluses, and also its minuses – such as the risk of Party members nominating candidates who have no intention of standing. This happens in the Observer poll in at least one case. Six per cent of its respondents opted for Jacob Rees-Mogg. But, as he told Andrew Gimson on this site last week, he will not run.
A fair question for our monthly survey is: how can one know its results are representative? YouGov must also grapple with it. “Unlike national opinion polls that are adjusted to reflect the electorate as a whole, the survey of Tory members could not be altered in the same way,” the Observer reports.