What our data tells us about the shape of the referendum campaign with two days to go

Today's YouGov poll for The Times, with a two point lead for Leave, is within the margin of error of the last poll published in The Sunday Times, which showed a one point lead for Remain.

For those trying to identify momentum, to tell "the story" of the campaign, it must be frustrating: having recorded a surge towards Brexit, we now show the campaigns roughly neck and neck again, where they have been for most of the past three months.

So what is the story? Let's start with some narratives that you will hear but that are not borne out by the evidence.

First, the idea suggested by Nigel Farage on Sunday – that "we did have momentum until the terrible tragedy" [of Jo Cox’s murder] – does not appear to be true.

This morning YouGov released results of a model developed by our chief scientist, Professor Doug Rivers, together with Benjamin Lauderdale of the LSE, which computes our daily data from voters.

It suggests that the surge towards Brexit was building throughout the second week of June, building to a "peak Brexit" moment on June 12-13 (one week ago, when the last Times survey showed a seven point lead for Leave), and was already starting to come back down again by the Monday before Jo Cox was attacked.

The data stops at teatime on Sunday, before the prime minister’s performance on Question Time – we’ll be publishing updates to the model before Thursday’s vote.



