Harris poll shows 9 point lead

In this morning's Metro there is a new voting intention poll for Harris. Harris were once one of the most regular UK political pollsters but left the scene sometime after 1997, becoming a leading online polling company in the USA as Harris Interactive. They made a surprise return just before the 2005 election and did very well, but since then we have only had one voting intention poll from them, though they have done other polling for Metro of a panel of working age Londoners (called something like UrbanLife). (That isn't them anyway - BMRB conduct it!)

Today's poll has topline voting intention figures of CON 39%(+4), LAB 30%(+10), LDEM 22%(+6) - changes are from Harris's last poll in June 2009, which had "others" on a rather incongruous 29%, hence all the partie being up. We can't tell a vast amount from the poll, since without a recent track record we don't know how it compares to other pollsters figures, but we can at least hope that it's a sign of regular Harris polls to come in the run up to the election.

I haven't been able to have a dig around in their tables yet, but for those interested in methodology, here's what I wrote in June 2009: "Harris are on online company with their own panel, like YouGov and Angus Reid. Their polls are weighted by age, gender, educational achievement, region and internet usage, but not it would seem by past vote or party ID. Instead Harris use something they call “propensity score weighting”, a proprietory weighting they say corrects for behavioural and attitudinal biases from different peoples likelihood to be online. Exactly how it does so, we don’t know." Of course, I can't guarantee they haven't changed any of that since!

The poll was conducted between the 16th and 22nd and included 900 people (so quite a long time for a small number of interviews).