Something to make the blue team happy – perhaps?

Make of this what you will and it might just be a huge coincidence but there appears to be a split between the pollsters that have been tested in a general election and those that haven’t.

The pollsters with asterisks next to their names in the chart were all regular pollsters in the run-up to GE2010. The ones without them weren’t.

Some of the firms classified as untested were around in 2010 but in a different form from their current operation. Thus Populus was the regular pollster for the Times five years ago but then it was a phone firm. Today’s Populus online polls are therefore treated as a newbie.

Same goes for TNS. Its new poll series is online which is totally different from its face to face operation which it still continues with for some its surveys.

I am treating ComRes as two separate polling series-the phone surveys which it now does for the Mail which was about pre 2010 and the online ComRes political polling which started after GE2010.

The Lord Ashcroft National Poll started about a year ago while Survation entered the political polling arena at the January 2011 Oldham East & Saddleworth by-election.

Looking at the chart the only established pollster recording a LAB lead is Ipsos-MORI which I now just call Ipsos. YouGov, Opinium, ComRes phone and ICM are the other four pollsters which have surveyed previous general elections.

Mike Smithson

For 11 years viewing politics from OUTSIDE the Westminster bubble

For latest polling and political betting news follow @MSmithsonPB