Daily polling roundup April 20th

Another manic Monday! Today we got four GB polls, starting with Populus/FT. Six of the last 9 Populus online polls have had Labour 2 points ahead, so no surprises here:


ICM/Guardian, now weekly for the campaign, showed a reversion to the mean after last week‘s apparent rogue poll. The tables didn’t show any of the odd features from last week.


Lord Ashcroft’s phone poll moved in the opposite direction to ICM, with a four-point Tory lead after a tie last week. Although that means the last two Mondays’ phone polls have each averaged a three-point Conservative lead, given how odd ICM looked last week, in all likelihood it’s probably a widening of the lead as measured by phone:


Ashcroft also published a pair of constituency surveys in Edinburgh, which showed the SNP leading comfortably in Edinburgh North & Leith and narrowly in Edinburgh South. Incredibly, the 15% Labour to SNP swing in the latter is (by 5 points) the smallest swing Lord Ashcroft has found between those parties so far.
And finally YouGov/Sun, which was basically unchanged. So the phone vs online poll divergence seems to be continuing – watch this space for more on that in the very near future.


YouGov also had a Scottish Westminster poll out for the Times. Coincidentally, this also showed almost no change since the previous one (on April 9th):


We also got two very different student polls – YouthSight hads Labour 10 points ahead of the Conservatives and the Greens collapsing 13 points down to third, while High Fliers had a tie for the lead and the Greens only 6 points behind in third places!


On a more general note, polling accuracy is becoming increasingly topical given the apparent closeness of the election. In a guest article for Political Betting, NOP’s Keiran Pedley discusses “Why this could be like 1992 when the polls were simply wrong”.
And finally, just to set any conspiracy theorists straight:


Tomorrow we’ll get the daily YouGov poll for the Sun and probably others too.





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