CON 40% (33)
LAB 28% (43)
LD 15% (17)

Are the blues are doing better where it matters?

Today’s exclusive PB/Angus Reid poll was a standard national opinion survey making up its sample from 2,002 participants from constituencies all over Britain. It was not a specific marginals poll.

But because of the size of the sample it has been possible to isolate that section of those surveyed who live in the main LAB>CON marginals. So the figures above are based on the responses of the 446 participants from the 150 Labour-held seats which are most vulnerable to the Tories. The numbers in the brackets are how those seats voted in 2005.

What’s critical here are not the detailed numbers so much but that it further supports the idea that the marginals are behaving differently from others seats.

So in the non-marginals in this poll there’s about a 7.5% swing from Labour to the Tories – in the marginals it is 10 11%.

A big caveat is that this is not a full poll – only a pretty chunky sub-set and we’ll have to see if this is the pattern in other AR polls in the coming weeks.

But overall it does support the argument that in one form or another we’ve been making all week

Mike Smithson