The August ICM poll sees reverse cross-over with LAB moving from a 1% deficit to a 7% lead
And the inevitable “what if Boris was CON leader” questions
Tonight’s big polling news is that Labour has moved up sharply in the monthly ICM phone poll for the Guardian. In July EdM’s party was 1% behind. Now they are 7% ahead.
I must admit that I’m rather surprised by these latest findings and was expecting both main parties to be just about level-pegging. We’ll have to wait till the full data is out before we can work out what’s happened.
ICM tends to find UKIP with lower numbers than other firms partly because of its turnout filtering which scales back by 50% the value of responses of non-voters from GE2010.
Because of ICM’s long-standing reputation as the “gold standard” its finding are taken more seriously than just about any other pollster and inevitably tonight’s numbers will hearten EdM’s team as they go into next month’s conference season.
There were the inevitable BoJo questions with the inevitable findings. The LAB lead drops to 3% with the Mayor as the leader and he’s by far and away the most popular choice as Dave’s replacement.
Feeding tonight's ICM shares into Electoral Calculus we get a projected majority of 86 for EdM's party pic.twitter.com/R3Slx7sEQC
— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) August 11, 2014
The real problem for Cameron is that time is running out for the Tories.