The survey has produced much the same result as it did when we last published on August 4th. Then, Rishi Sunak was on 26 per cent, Liz Truss was on 58 per cent and 12 per cent were undecided. Now, those figures are 28 per cent, 60 per cent and nine per cent. We have rolled Neither and Won’t Vote into the same column this time round.
If our don’t knows are divided evenly between the two candidates, an exercise we carried out last time, Truss goes up to 64 per cent and Sunak to 32 per cent – and so maintains the 32 point lead she had last time round. YouGov’s last poll, which closed on August 2nd, the day our last survey went out, gave her a 38 point lead. Opinium’s latest poll, conducted last week, gave her a 22 point lead.
The new element in the survey is our question about how many panel members have voted. (We asked it last time – but the issue of ballot papers had been delayed after CCHQ was warned by GCHQ that online voting could be hacked.) Sixty per cent of respondents say they have and 40 per cent say they haven’t.
The sum of Opinium, YouGov and our survey is that Truss is set to win by a margin roughly between 70-30 and 60-40 – perhaps a bit higher, perhaps a bit lower. To which the riposte from Camp Sunak is that none of us are properly weighting for the larger southern Associations whose members are more likely to vote for their man in larger numbers than others.