Harris return to voting intention polling...with 29% for Others

This morning's Metro holds a surprise - there is a voting intention poll from Harris. Once a regular pollster in the UK, Harris dropped out of political polling and became an online company. They produced one poll prior to the last general election (which compared very well indeed with the actual result getting the Conservatives bang on, Labour within 2 points and the Lib Dems within 1) and carries out a regular international poll for the FT, but these are the first voting intention figures we've seen from them since 2005.

The topline voting intention figures stand at CON 35%, LAB 20%, LDEM 16%. Others register at a rather remarkable 29%, including 10% for UKIP, 6% for Green and 4% for the BNP. We've seen inflated figures for minor parties from all the pollsters in the run-up to, and since, the European elections, but this is something else and something I'm rather sceptical of.

Full tables are on Harris's website here. For those interested in methodology, Harris are on online company with their own panel, like YouGov. Their polls are weighted by age, gender, educational achievement, region and internet usage, but not it would seem by past vote or party ID (in fact, the recalled past vote in the tables looks very odd indeed - in their unweighted sample Harris found more people claiming to have voted Tory in 2005 than Labour, so hopefully the weighting corrected that!). 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. Exaclty how it does so, we don't know.

While Harris did ask how likely people would be to vote, they do not appear to have weighted or filtered by it.