ICM show Labour recovering
ICM's (presumably) final poll of the year has topline figures, with changes from their last poll three weeks ago, of CON 39%(-2), LAB 34%(+4), LDEM 18%(-1), suggesting a significant recovery for Labour from the worst of their lows. Unlike in the YouGov poll yesterday, there is no boost for the Lib Dems, but at least some of the poll would have been conducted
before Nick Clegg was crowned Lib Dem leader, so we shouldn't expect to see any boost from the publicity surrounding the new leader yet.
The poll was conducted almost simultaenously with yesterday's YouGov poll, yet they tell sharply contrasting stories. YouGov had Labour still declining, ICM recovering. The other pollsters don't give us much help - Populus also had Labour in steep decline, Ipsos MORI had them recovering.
Incidentally, something odd is happening with ICM polls lately. Normally I assume all polls done by the same pollster using the same methodology are perfectly comparable, ignoring considerations like what time of the week the poll was conducted or what paper commissioned it.
Looking at ICM's polls since the Tories retook the lead in October though, there seems to be a consistent pattern of lower Tory shares in ICM's Guardian polls compared to the ones for the Sundays. Their first poll to put the Conservatives back ahead was a poll for the Sunday Telegraph that put the Tories up on 43%, the following weekend poll for the Guardian put them down 3 points at 40%. A fortnight later a poll for the Sunday Express had them back up at 43%, the following Guardian poll had them back down to 37%, a week later they were back up at 41% in a News of the World poll, down they are back down to 39%. Until this poll there was a similar up-and-down pattern to the Lib Dem score in ICM polls, with higher Lib Dem scores in polls for the Guardian.
I was pondering whether this difference was due to Guardian polls being done at the weekend, and ICM's polls for the Sundays which are conducted mid-week. This poll was conducted mid-week though. There is no apparant difference in any of the weightings or adjustments made to the polls ICM do for the Guardian or for other papers, perhaps it is purely co-incidence.
UPDATE: ICM have also updated their analysis of regional breaks in the vote. I always advise people to be wary of the regional breaks in normal polls because they have very low sample sizes, and because polls are only weighted at the national level, so may be skewed within regions. Every now and again ICM aggregate their data from several months of polls to produce regional breaks - this doesn't necessarily do much to allieviate problems with weighting, but does at least take away concerns about sample size. When they did this exercise back in August they found the Tory advance was largely concentrated in the South outside London, with only modest advances in the Midlands and London and them going backwards in the North.
The latest analysis, based on data collected since October, shows the Tory advance is still strongest in the South, but they are now making strong progess in the North and the Midlands too. Only in Scotland and Wales are they relatively static, suggesting the Conservatives are now making a broader advance.
