support an EU referendum. Ian McKenzie, the campaign's communications director, said the 30.3% turnout was "truly astonishing", higher than many council election turnouts. He added: "This turnout is unignorable. The sitting MP and her Labour opponent cannot stick their fingers in their ears, or they are half the politicians I think they are. We were just 2,000 short of the votes the main candidates got in the election." The local elections held in Thurrock on 3 May 2012 had an average turnout of 26%, the Thurrock Gazette reported in an article titled 'Councillors ponder poor vote turnout', that the turnout for the People's Pledge referendum was higher than the turnout for last week's Thurrock Council election. Polling Another YouGov poll commissioned by the campaign ahead of its launch found that, of 2,436 voters, 61% supported the idea of holding a referendum, with 25% opposing. An opinion poll carried out by YouGov for the campaign showed that 54% would rather have a vote on whether Britain should remain members of the European Union than the 25% who wanted a vote on the Alternative Voting system. To coincide with the proposed bailout of Portugal the campaign commissioned two further polls. It found that 65% were against Britain's participation in bailing out Portugal, while only 19% were in favour. It also found that 55% say that if we do contribute to the bail out of Portugal then we should have a referendum on our continued membership of the EU. Only 25% were against having a referendum under these circumstances. The poll results were widely reported in various newspapers and were used by Seddon in his comment piece in the Daily Express on 8 April. and by the economist Ruth Lea in a thunderer piece in The Times on the same day. In a piece for the Evening Standard entitled Miliband 'can split the Coalition if he backs a poll on EU membership, a poll commissioned by the campaign found that 53 per cent of Labour supporters would back holding an "in-out" referendum. Some 76 per cent of Tory voters and 51 per cent of Lib-Dem supporters would also support a vote. Advisory Council member and former government whip Graham Stringer said: "If Ed wants a game changer, and we are not doing as well as we should be doing in the opinion polls, but if he wants to put the Conservatives into disarray,