And Lib Dems switch to the Tories – not Labour

The boss of Populus, Andrew Cooper, has very kindly given me advanced sight of the detail from today’s poll in the Times and I reproduce part of it above.

There are two main features:- A big disparity between the responses of Labour and Tory voters when it comes to their likelihood to vote and evidence that Labour is not picking up as many 2005 Lib Dem supporters as they had been in recent surveys. So for every three that are going to Labour four are now saying they will vote Tory.

From those saying they are “certain to vote” the Tories have a hefty lead.

This morning’s was not based on the full sample. Further fieldwork is being carried out today and, hopefully, we should see the full survey tomorrow.

Meanwhile another ICM poll is under-way – possibly for the News of the World.

Polling update from ICM The boss of the firm, Nick Sparrow, has been in touch to explain what happened last night when the first findings were amended later. This is what he writes: “The 1 point Labour lead in the Guardian last night was based on 977 interviews completed by the time we reached a copy deadline. When we added in the final few interviews we got the result of 38%/38%. The full weighting and adjustment was applied to both sets of data.”

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Mike Smithson