I try to remember to call these surveys just that and not opinion polls because they are self-selecting and do not use a random sample of party members. However, previous surveys have, when able to be judged against subsequent party votes, proved a good guide to party opinion. Most notably, my 2015 survey got closer to the leadership election result than other surveys, polls and predictions. In addition, the number of questions asked about participants provide a variety of ways to protect against fake responses and the like. This time around, after removing various dodgy and duplicate entries, responses with fake emails and the like, 2,863 valid entries remained. Plenty enough to deal with fluctuations due to random chance, but how might these results be systematically skewed? Most importantly, they are skewed towards people who are the sort of members who come to hustings. Overall, between 5,000 and 10,000 members will make it to a hustings and around 65,000 votes are likely to be cast. But in the survey, 45% said they had or would attend a hustings. Hustings attendees come out with answers a little more favourable for Davey than Swinson. That matches also what I’ve heard from people who have been to hustings and my own timings on the length of applause at several: Davey comes out with more applause and with more favourable comments. So the bias towards hustings attendees in this survey may bias the results in Davey’s favour. On similar lines, the results are skewed towards those who are more active in the party and who have been members for longer. Again, that benefits Davey over Swinson somewhat, as does – perhaps counter-intuitively – the survey’s findings that Davey’s support is higher with women than with men given that overall the responses are more male than the party’s membership. However, nearly all the surveys were completed before the big waves of posted mailings from the candidates. As Davey generally has out-posted Swinson 2:1 this may, therefore, dampen his results, balancing out some of the above trends. I had considered reweighting all the figures to attempt to adjust for these biases, but in the end the amount of ‘black box magic’ that would mean rests behind the figures given the absence of good data to come up with the weightings means I have gone instead for raw totals (with the dodgy returns removed) and this health warning. Take the figures that follow as being plus or minus something like 5% given the sorts of plausible levels of net bias once all the above factors are taken into account.