Tonight we got two polls, Opinium for tomorrow's Observer, and YouGov for the Sunday Times. Opinium’s poll, the fieldwork for which was entirely before Thursday, showed Labour and the Conservatives basically neck and neck, which suggests that last week’s post-budget swing to the Tories was not real, or at least not sustained:
Opinium/Observer CON 34 (-2) LAB 33 (=) LIB 8 (+1) UKIP 13 (-1) GRN 7 (+1) Fieldwork 24th-25th N=1,959 Tabs http://t.co/9k4M1lfKm0 #GE2015
— NumbrCrunchrPolitics (@NCPoliticsUK) March 28, 2015
Told by @OpinionBee that DC's +1 net rating is the first time any CON/LAB/LIB party leader has been +ve with Opinium since June 2011 #GE2015
— NumbrCrunchrPolitics (@NCPoliticsUK) March 28, 2015
YouGov/Times showed Labour four points ahead, with Ed Miliband’s personal ratings up sharply too. The YouGov fieldwork was entirely after Thursday night’s event (update 22:25 – to be precise, 10:30am Friday to 8:30am today):
YouGov/Times: CON 32 (-4) LAB 36 (+2) LIB 8 (+1) UKIP 13 (=) GRN 6 (+1) Fieldwork entirely AFTER the #BattleForNumber10/#camVmili #GE2015
— NumbrCrunchrPolitics (@NCPoliticsUK) March 28, 2015
As the period after the budget showed, any sharp move (whether event-driven or otherwise) should be treated with caution. As Chris Hanretty posted, the YouGov/Times poll ought not to have moved much from recent numbers – viewing figures were in line with a typical edition of Question Time, which presumably means the sort of viewers were the same too (those interested in politics). So it’s possible that there’s response bias, but we won’t really know where things stand until Monday’s polls, which are currently in the field.
There are no polls expected tomorrow, however I’ll hopefully be posting a writeup on yesterday’s forecasting conference.
