Athough ahead on votes te Tories would trail on seats Unfortunately I was tied up in a meeting when Lord Ashcroft’s first weekly phone poll came out and am only now just catching up. Looking at the methodology this seems to be following ICM or how Populus used to do it when they were pollster for the Times. The sample is past vote weighted and there is a spiral of silence adjustment. It looks sound. The only caveat I’ve got…
The big polling news is that Lord Ashcroft has announced that starting this week he’ll be doing a weekly phone poll right through until the general election. He’ll also be doing regular battleground surveys. This is a great development because so much of current polling is online and phone surveys have now been reduced to just three a month – ComRes, ICM and Ipsos-MORI. They are a lot more costly but, as we saw in 2010 and at he AV…
And the purples continue to progress for the Euros
Postal voting starts for the Euros pic.twitter.com/PrO0foV8JO — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 4, 2014 For them the elections are over The latest for postal vote packs to have gone out was yesterday and will have arrived this morning. Given what we know of how quickly postal voters generally act and the level of turnouts that these elections attract it is not too dramatic an assumption to say that getting on for half of all the votes have now been cast….
The Tories still very strong favourite to hold Newark. Ukip now out to 5/1 pic.twitter.com/8cY37u9Vvs — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 8, 2014 Will this survive the first poll? So far I have not had confirmation that a Newark poll is in the pipeline but it is hard to envisage such a key contest taking place without a survey. Maybe we’ll have to wait until after the May 22nd elections. Until then punters are flying blind. Will UKIP’s Roger Helmer split…
What Labour's petty attack ad, sorry PPB, tells me is they have no economic plan and nothing positive to say. Petty politics. — Tim Farron (@timfarron) May 7, 2014 On this @DPJHodges is right. LAB PPB is shallow & silly and could alienate LD switchers on which all party's GE2015 hopes are dependent on. — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 7, 2014
Remember this encounter with Boris? Nobody does the tough political interviews better Latest PaddyPower http://t.co/45A6m2316P betting on Paxman's replacement on @BBCNewsnight pic.twitter.com/JeYAezKD8O — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 6, 2014
Same questions, same pollster, different numbers For GE2015 the Sun on Sunday poll has CON 33, LAB 36, LD 10, Ukip 15. The S Times Westminster voting intentions poll from YouGov has CON 33, LAB 36, LD 9, UKIP 15 What is clear is that the Tories are edging up in the Euros. Last week YouGov had them on 18%. If on May 22 the Greens do leapfrog the LDs for fourth place then that could have serious consequences for…