With the general election only a couple of weeks away, it has been fascinating to follow the fluctuations of the opinion polls. Or at least fascinating in the way that they don't change significantly from day to day, or even week to week, or even over the last couple of months. Although polls from individual polling organisations do bobble about by a couple of percentage points, putting the Conservatives in the lead one day, Labour the next, the BBC's rolling average has remained stubbornly immovable since the start of the campaign. Clearly, they could simply be massaging the data in a peculiar way, but one hopes they have some on-the-ball statisticians on hand who know how to calculate an average.
This may indicate that political campaigning is mostly a waste of time, in as much as voters' opinions were pretty much formed many months ago, and all the lively speechifying and confrontational debating and pointed interviewing and satirical lampooning is only so much water off a duck's back. To illustrate this, I have included a picture of a duck (
below). You have to use your imagination for the water.
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