That ORC poll – and whether it means anything

A government-friendly pollster has flouted Turkey’s ban on opinion polls – as it said it would. The results are still interesting.

A government-friendly pollster has flouted Turkey’s ban on opinion polls – as it said it would. The results are still interesting.

ORC and the partiesThe ORC polling company has flouted Turkey’s ban on opinion polls – as it said it would.

The topline figures for the survey, for which ORC says it spoke to 3850 people face-to-face on 31 May and 1 June, are as follows (with changes from the last ORC survey published on 1 May):

AK Party 46.0 (-1.5)
CHP 25.3 (+1.4)
MHP 15.5 (+0.5)
HDP 9 (+0.9)
Others 4.2 (-1.3)

The company, which has long produced very high leads for the governing AK Party but says it funded this research itself, has published a three slide document of the results on its website.

Besides a cover page and a pie chart, it includes one slide boasting how astonishingly close it predicted the 2011 parliamentary and 2014 local results – within 1% point for each, it claims.

Where is Saadet?

The ORC is about as opaque as every other Turkish pollster. We simply don’t know how it came up with these numbers. For all we know, its AK Party result could be at the top end of its margin of error while the HDP is at the bottom. But we don’t even know what that margin of error is.

This is also is the first ORC since March not to give separate figures for the Saadet-BBP electoral alliance. Can we be sure all their votes have been totted up neatly under the “Others” column?

Wavering results

But let’s repeat our exercise of a month ago and compare these results to the others declared by the ORC this year:

ORC - AK Party June 2015ORC - CHP June 2015
ORC - MHP June 2015 ORC - HDP June 2015

Don’t despair, HDP fans: this poll is the highest vote share for the fourth party from the ORC since September 2014.

More notably, 46% is the lowest AK Party result since March 2013 in an ORC general election voting intention poll.

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