The figures could also be interpreted as this:
LESS THAN HALF of people polled support keeping the EMA.

Would be less sensational though then, wouldn’t it? Put a completely different spin on things.

Shame on you. It is small things like this which prevents a constructive debate on ANY topic these days, whether it is immigration, welfare reform or NHS reform.

45% oppose, 41% support. I doubt this is going to be a killer issue on those figures.

And as for this: “MPs such as Sarah Teather and Simon Hughes both have large amounts of teenagers on EMA in their constituencies.” Did you look at the figures – for the youngest age group surveyed (18-24) 45% support abolition, 44% oppose. I think you may be guilty of favouring assumption over facts there…

Why do I never get asked these questions in YouGov polls? I usually get the ones which ask, ‘which company would you be PROUD to work for’ (and which would you be EMBARRASSED to work for) when I couldn’t give a monkey’s about any of them. And which brands offer ‘value for money’, and which brands have I heard something POSITIVE/NEGATIVE about (which could be via an ad, a news story, or something a friend has said).

I stick with it thinking I may get a proper poll about politics and sometimes do get asked who I’d vote for but never things like this. Are they excluding me deliberately? Is it a conspiracy to get the correct answers?

Clare

There are about 300,000 people on the YouGov panel and they do five ‘daily’ polls a week with a sample size of about 2,000. So on average you would expect to asked only about once every 30 weeks.

Actually even that will vary because some types of people are under-represented on the YouGov panel. So, to even things up, if you fall into certain groups, you get asked more often. For example a male, 18-24 year old, social grade DE, Mirror-reading Northerner will get asked a lot. A female, in her forties, social grade AB, Guardian-reading Londoner less so. YouGov has a lot of those on its panel (because people with that sort of profile are more likely to want to answer consumer and political questions)

Even then a lot of the ‘daily’ polls (like the ones you seem to have got) only ask about voting intention and government approval, plus a few ‘tracker’ questions. These are where YouGov ask once a week or fortnight the same questions about things such as Party leaders, attitudes on the economy etc.

In addition there may be additional questions on current topics (such as the EMA) but these aren’t asked every day. The only time you can usually rely on them being there is Thursday night/Friday morning polls, the results of which appear in the Sunday Times. Presumably the ST is willing to pay the extra for questions on the topics it is interested in. The Sun, who commission the other four polls in YouGov’s weekly cycle, have less queries and spread them over four days.