With trend lines added
Full Poll Tracker of all quarterly @BelTel LucidTalk polls, from the 2022 NI Assembly election - now inc. the LucidTalk Autumn26 NI 'Tracker' poll (3,989 sample, NI representative)...View quoted post on X
мαяк from Sandy Row | 🇬🇧
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Interested in free speech, FOI. Personal account. "Cheerfully cynical"
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This is quite enlightening
This data was shocking 😳View quoted post on X
Today I'm remembering Private George Dow. My son bears his name George. My daughter bears the name Dow. His name is on the Haugh of Glass war memorial. Incidentally the Cameron almost directly across is from David Cameron's family. David's father lived in Glass
I have been told the TUV were on good form with Haribo snacks and the Belfast Telegraph poll announced and an ebullient Jim Allister
@SuzyJourno At the TUV annual dinner last night, there was a small pack of Haribo at every place setting. Who says we don't have a sense of humour?View quoted post on X
Fair question, Alan, and I share your hope that the future could be good. But politics doesn't happen in a clean room. It's made of grievance, memory and rival accounts of the same events, and a poll that only touched the comfortable bits would be measuring a politics that doesn't exist.
If we all agreed, we'd all vote the same way and there'd be no point in elections or polls. Divergence of opinion is what gives politics its meaning. A pollster who steers clear of where the cracks run deepest is steering clear of the very thing they're there to measure.
Things you hold dear, I might despise. Things I enjoy might be vile to someone else. If "somebody finds it reprehensible" is the test for what can be asked, the most easily offended person in each community sets the agenda, and nobody will ever agree who that is. The only workable rule is to ask fairly about everything and let the answers speak.
Imagine a pollster saying "we should never touch health, it's too controversial", or a doctor saying "doctors disagree about this, so let's stay clear of it". We'd see straight away that it gets things backwards. Disagreement is a reason to handle a topic with care, not a reason to skip it.
Polling Drumcree isn't endorsing blame or reopening old fights. It's finding out where people stand. "Let's move on" is itself a claim, that people are ready to, and you can test that rather than assume it. If the poll offers an option to disagree, or to say the question shouldn't be asked, everyone who shares your view can be counted. If "move on" really is the majority view, the numbers will show it.
People have every right to say Drumcree, or whatever the issue of the season is, doesn't interest them, and a poll can record that too. But picture three people in a room. One says it doesn't matter to them, and the other two are still at loggerheads. The first person's indifference tells you about them, not about the other two.
If pollsters stay clear of these things, all it does is mask the fractures in our society. Imagine people with broken bones who never went to the hospital and just moaned about it at home: it wouldn't make the bones any less broken. Those fractures turn up on election day, and nobody should be surprised by a result the polls were too nervous to ask about.
Parties already commission private polling on exactly these subjects. If public pollsters steer clear, the information doesn't disappear, it just stops being public. Is that really the outcome we want? The parties know what's working on the fault lines, and everyone else is left in the dark.
Pollsters should be willing to cover any subject, not manicure their questions to suit your agenda or mine.
If we all agreed, we'd all vote the same way and there'd be no point in elections or polls. Divergence of opinion is what gives politics its meaning. A pollster who steers clear of where the cracks run deepest is steering clear of the very thing they're there to measure.
Things you hold dear, I might despise. Things I enjoy might be vile to someone else. If "somebody finds it reprehensible" is the test for what can be asked, the most easily offended person in each community sets the agenda, and nobody will ever agree who that is. The only workable rule is to ask fairly about everything and let the answers speak.
Imagine a pollster saying "we should never touch health, it's too controversial", or a doctor saying "doctors disagree about this, so let's stay clear of it". We'd see straight away that it gets things backwards. Disagreement is a reason to handle a topic with care, not a reason to skip it.
Polling Drumcree isn't endorsing blame or reopening old fights. It's finding out where people stand. "Let's move on" is itself a claim, that people are ready to, and you can test that rather than assume it. If the poll offers an option to disagree, or to say the question shouldn't be asked, everyone who shares your view can be counted. If "move on" really is the majority view, the numbers will show it.
People have every right to say Drumcree, or whatever the issue of the season is, doesn't interest them, and a poll can record that too. But picture three people in a room. One says it doesn't matter to them, and the other two are still at loggerheads. The first person's indifference tells you about them, not about the other two.
If pollsters stay clear of these things, all it does is mask the fractures in our society. Imagine people with broken bones who never went to the hospital and just moaned about it at home: it wouldn't make the bones any less broken. Those fractures turn up on election day, and nobody should be surprised by a result the polls were too nervous to ask about.
Parties already commission private polling on exactly these subjects. If public pollsters steer clear, the information doesn't disappear, it just stops being public. Is that really the outcome we want? The parties know what's working on the fault lines, and everyone else is left in the dark.
Pollsters should be willing to cover any subject, not manicure their questions to suit your agenda or mine.
Genuine query.View quoted post on X
Was there a question on whether we shouldn’t have been anywhere near these questions, conflicts and blaming others.
Please let’s move on, the future could just maybe be good…
