As Alistair Darling sat down after delivering his budget statement today, the mobile phone text alerts of the Gauge Opinion text polling panel started ringing. Our first text poll was up and running and we were keen to see how quickly we could gauge the political reaction to the big story of the day.
We asked whether Alistair Darling’s budget had made people more or less likely to vote Labour in the coming election and the news for Labour is not great. For 54% of those responding all the economic statistics, tax changes and spending cuts had made no difference whatsoever to how they were planning to vote. For 29% of the panel the budget had made them less likely to vote Labour. Only 17% were sufficiently impressed to indicate that they were now more likely to vote Labour as a result of the contents of the Chancellor’s budget briefcase.
And the Gauge Opinion text polling panel members came through this trial with flying colours. This was our first text poll run primarily to test the system and see how quickly we could gather and analyse the data. Gauge Opinion text poll panel members clearly have speedy texting thumbs. 50% of our members responded within an hour and 75% within 3 or 4 hours. We still need to recruit some more panel members before we can claim that our network fully represents the views of the UK population. This poll was just of 100 people and we need 1000 to be properly representative.
But the technology works, our panel members are happy to reply to political opinion polls quickly. Now we just need to a few more people to register their mobile phone numbers at www.gaugeopinion.co.uk and stand by for the next gauge opinion text poll. So sign up now and start texting your views into the news.
