Communicate on Britain, Populus on Scotland
Communicate Research's monthly poll has voting intention figures with changes from last month of CON 35%(-5), LAB 31%(+2), LDEM 20%(+3). The poll was conducted between March 23-25th. The figures appear to show a very sharp drop in Conservative support, but as noted before, the lack of political weighting in Communicate and Ipsos-MORI polls means the results are more volatile and shifts from one month to the next less meaningful. (UPDATE - someone's pointed out that the Independent's coverage of the polls that that it was indeed weighted by past vote. I'm trying to find out if Communicate have altered their methodology and will update once I get an answer. UPDATE II - confirmed, Communicate Research polls are now weighted by past vote - I'll put a proper post up on it when I get the details of their new methodology. What this means is that their future pollls should be less volatile, although it doesn't mean that we can read much more into the changes this month, as last month's sample could have just been unusually stuffed full of Tories!).
Meanwhile Populus have released their first poll of Scottish voting intentions ahead of the Parliamentary elections in May. The voting intention figures in the constituency section are CON 14%, LAB 28%, LDEM 15%, SNP 38%, while in the more important regional top-up vote support stands at CON 14%, LAB 30%, SNP 35%, LDEM 14%. On Weber Shandwick's swingometer this translates into the SNP becoming the largest party with 49 seats to Labour's 43, with the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats both on 18.
UPDATE: MORI's monthly figures have also been released...sort of. A note on their website says that "as we are still running methodological tests while merging the Ipsos and MORI field operations, we are not publishing a full Political Monitor in March". However, they have released voting intentions from a separate face-to-face omnibus survey which uses the same sampling and weighting regime as their normal figures. The topline voting intentions, with changes from the last MORI poll in January, are CON 41%(+2), LAB 33%(-2), LDEM 17%(-2). It was carried out between the 9th and the 15th March.
