Daily polling roundup 26th April

This weekend saw the release of four new national voting intention polls. Opinium's weekly poll for the Observer showed the Conservatives fractionally ahead rather than the three point lead it had shown last week:


Survation for the Mail on Sunday showed a very similar picture to their previous poll for the Mirror:


YouGov, by contrast, continued to show Labour with their noses ahead, first for the Times:


And then tonight for the Sun:


In Scotland, a Panelbase poll for the Times showed another huge SNP lead, but a very close split with regard to independence:


We also got some further marginals polling from Ashcroft. Both the Southeastern Conservative-UKIP contests he polled remain close – Thurrock is a three-way contest with Labour, the Tories and UKIP all separated by just five points. Over in the West of England, the first Bristol West poll by anyone put the Greens in 2nd place behind Labour, up and impressive 21 points on 2010, but still some way from taking the seat. Overall there weren't any huge surprises in this batch – small improvements for the Conservatives, while the interpretation of the Green and UKIP polling depends what your expectations were.


One other finding of note – YouGov asked panelists what their views would be on various government formations. Of particular interest were voters' views on Labour or Tory majority governments. The results showed 43% thought a Tory majority would be good for the UK and 39% a Labour majority – both far higher than either party’s current polling. While neither appears likely to win a majority, what does it tell us about the leanings of those intending to vote for smaller parties? Both Lib Dems (43% to 31%) and UKIP voters (52% to 18%) were more likely to prefer a Tory-only government to a Labour one. But what’s also interesting is the breakdown by voting intention reveals that CON, LAB, LIB and UKIP voters only add up to a figure about 5 or 6 points less than the headline number for each of the two largest parties. The Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru collectively had about 10% of this poll, which could account for a lot of the “gap” in the Labour headline figure. But what about the Conservatives? It seems likely that most of their “gap” is explained by “don’t knows” or those refusing to answer…


And finally, “Bojo” by Ben Stanley feat. Boris Johnson:
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/202673594″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
Tomorrow we can look forward to the usual Monday helping of Populus/FT, Ashcroft National (plus focus group), ICM/Guardian and YouGov/Sun.





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