Harris/Daily Mail poll

There was a Harris poll in the Daily Mail yesterday. Voting intention figures are incomprehensible. To quote from the Mail "The Tories are down from 36 per cent at the election to just 29 per cent, while Lib Dem support has collapsed from 23 per cent to just 12. Labour are on 28 per cent, down from 29 at the election. But a huge 17 per cent of people said they were undecided."

Where to start? Firstly the Harris poll was of Great Britain, not the United Kingdom, so they should be comparing it to the GB result (CON 37%, LAB 30%, LDEM 24%). Secondly, 17% for don't know isn't huge, it's comparable to other polls. Most importantly, they haven't repercentaged to exclude don't knows, so obviously all the parties are down. It is unclear whether or not they have also excluded won't votes, so it's not even possible to repercentage yourself. If they have excluded won't votes, it implies 17% support for other parties, which seems unfeasible (though the newer online pollsters did tend to produce some very high scores for others before the election). If they didn't exclude won't votes either then it implies shares somewhere in the region of CON 36%, LAB 35%, LDEM 15%, but we can't be sure.

On other questions, Harris found 26% thought Cameron had done better than they expected, 22% worse. 42% said he had been in line with expectations, though obviously we don't know if those people's expectations were positive or negative! For Osborne 12% thought he had exceeded expectations, 20% that he had done worse, Clegg was 19% and 29% respectively and Cable 13% better and 21% worse.

On opinions of the government, Harris asked people which words they'd use to describe it, with particularly unenlightning answers! All the words quoted in the paper were agreed with by about 52%-59% of people, included positive and negative ones - so 59% thought they were honest, 52% effective, 59% united... but 57% thought they are disappointing, 59% unpopular and 52% unbalanced. At least, I suppose there is an answer that everyone liked.

The only poll I'm aware of from the Sunday Papers is YouGov's regular tracker survey - voting intention stands at CON 42%, LAB 37%, LDEM 13%.

UPDATE: Tabs for the Harris poll are here now. Had the poll been repercentaged it would have shown voting intentions of CON 38%, LAB 36%, LDEM 16%, Others 10%.