CON 38% (40)
LAB 25% (24)
LD 20% (19)

And will “others” will be squeezed by polling day?

There’s a new exclusive PB/Angus Reid poll just out where the fieldwork started on Tuesday and finished only last night. The shares are above and show the Tories down a touch with Labour at its highest ever recorded level with the online pollster.

This is the first full national survey to have been carried out since the three Labour MPs and a Tory peer were charged over their expenses.

The moves are very much in line with the trends from other pollsters although AR does start from a slightly different base because of its methodological approach.

The figures for “others” were SNP 2%: PC 1%: UKIP 6%: GRN 3%: BNP 3%. The UKIP/GRN/BNP aggregate is quite a bit higher than some of the telephone pollsters and a lot of this is explained by the fact that AR do not weight by certainty to vote.

But the firm does ask “how certain are you that you will vote/support for this party?” and the responses are showing that a much higher proportion of the UKIP/GRN/BNP backers are saying that they could change their mind before the election takes place than supporters of the main parties. This is not, however, factored into the headline voting numbers.

Later on this afternoon I hope to get data from the poll that will show if respondees in the key LAB>CON marginals are behaving differently.

For me that is the key question in this election. For if they are then all those projections based on the simplistic uniform swing from 2005 are much less valuable.

More, I hope, later on the marginals along with the full data.

1430 UPDATE The full dataset is now available here.

Mike Smithson