CONSERVATIVES 41% (+2)
LABOUR 32% (-2)
LIB DEMS 15% (-1)

Is this a third body blow to Brown Central?

The second poll of the night, the ComRes poll for tomorrow’s Indy on Sunday, has the Tories back into the low 40s and Labour down a couple of points on where they were in the last survey from the pollster before Christmas. This follows the YouGov poll reported just over an a hour ago on the previous thread that had the Tories on 45% to Labour’s 32%.

This will add further to the gloom amongst Labour supporters because it was ComRes, it will be recalled, that in consecutive surveys at the end of November and early December 2008 produced the numbers that might be seen as the peak of the Brown bounce – Labour deficits of just one point.

All this reinforces the theory that I often postulate here – that Tory poll numbers are very sensitive to how much media coverage that Cameron is getting. Well the Tory leader has had a pretty good week which seems to have been reflected in tonight’s new polls.

So we have had three polls this week all pointing clearly in the same direction and it is looking more like a Conservative majority government is in prospect again.

As has been pointed out in previous posts a lot with ComRes depends on their past vote weightings which can change dramatically from poll to poll. With ICM and Populus these remain relatively constant and Anthony Wells of UKPollingReport and I have been trying, with data now supplied by the pollster, to work out why they are different.

More analysis needs to be carried out but ComRes does not appear to be operating its past vote weighting calculation in the same way as ICM and Populus. I plan to post on this again in the near future.

UPDATE 2030: The detailed data from this latest survey is now available here. It shows the past vote data in both weighted and unweighted forms which is one of the things we had been asking for.

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