The NHS remains the most important issue facing Britain despite falling 4% in the last month. Ipsos Mori note Those who are more likely to mention the NHS include those aged 55+ (51%), ABC1s (45%) and those in the South East outside of London (56%) compared with Londoners (34%), C2DEs (36%) and those aged 18-34 (24%). Could Ed Miliband’s plan to make the NHS central to the General Election have an effect, as the older age groups see the NHS…
The mid-term effects look to be finally wearing off Two months out from the election and from the Politicalbetting Polling Average, the Tories look to be coming into form at the right time. I say ‘look to be’ because there is a little more to it than meets the eye, but first the numbers for February, which are: Con 34.0 (+2.5), Lab 33.6 (+1.0), UKIP 12.0 (-2.5), LD 7.6 (-0.4), Grn 7.0 (-0.3), Oth 5.8 (-0.3) While we should be…
Greater certainty to vote amongst CON voters puts the blues back into the lead with Ashcroft The latest Ashcroft weekly phone poll is out and show a move back to CON and a 5% decline in the LAB vote. The figures and trend are in the chart above. The CON lead is almost totally down to turnout weighting. Before that was applied LAB was ahead by a small margin. Problem for them is that its voters are less certain to…
The above chart shows the CON lead in the polls from the first week in March 2010 and compares them with the actual election result nine and a half weeks later. As can be seen the polling at this stage proved to be a reasonably good pointer and in some cases better than the final polls. Of course past performance is no guarantee about what’s going to happen but it’s interest to look at. It is perhaps worth pointing out…
The battle is still on a knife-edge CON & LAB level-pegging in tonight's YouGov CON 34% LAB 34% LDEM 8% UKIP 14% GRN 5% — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) February 28, 2015 Opinium poll for Observer LAB 35 CON 34 LD 6 UKIP 14 GRN 6 — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) February 28, 2015 The big message for the Tories as we go into the last two months and a bit is that they need to have emphatic leads across a range of pollsters to be…
There’s little doubt that one of the great successes that UKIP has had has been in engaging within the political process those who have never, or not recently, used their vote. The above breakdown is from the latest Survation South Thanet poll illustrates this well. Because of the way the firm presents its data we are able to quantify the non-voting element. A big question with non-2010 voting support is whether their backing can be relied on as much as…
How many of the CON 2010 gains can be retained? At the end of last year I started monitoring England only data from the main pollsters partly in response to the very different political environment that’s developed in Scotland. All the phone pollsters are providing this in their regular datasets as well as Survation and Opinium. It would be great if YouGov and Populus could follow suit. For if, as expected, LAB suffers major losses to the SNP in Scotland…
Purples drop 5 while LAB edges close to overall majority The weekly Ashcroft phone poll continues to surprise us. From being, until last week, the only pollster not to have recorded a LAB lead in 2015 the latest, published at 4pm, has the very best figures for LAB in a phone poll since the Guardian’s ICM poll in mid-December. For UKIP the fall is in line with the trend if not the scale recorded by other pollsters. It does seem…