Ipsos MORI - CON 32, LAB 46, LDEM 9

Anthony Wells

— 2 min read
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Ipsos MORI's monthly political monitor is out with topline figures of CON 32%(-1), LAB 46%(+3), LDEM 9%(nc). Changes are from MORI's October monitor.

The 14 point Labour lead is the largest MORI have shown this Parliament and 46% the highest Labour have been, but before anyone gets too excited it is almost certainly due to a particularly odd sample, rather than a genuine shift in support.

As regular readers will know, most pollsters these days use some form of political weighting - in most cases weighting how people say their voted in the 2010 election to what the actual result was, adjusted slightly to account for people's known shortcomings in accurately reporting their vote (known as "false recall"). MORI are one of the few companies who don't do this - MORI's reasoning is that they believe that degrees of false recall can change quickly, and weighting by it therefore risks weighting out genuine changes in support. In contrast companies like ICM and Populus believe that false recall exists, but changes only slowly over time, meaning that recalled vote is suitable for weighting as long as false recall is accounted for.

In practice the phone companies are assuming quite a low level of false recall at the moment, so most polls have past vote weighted very close to the actual results of the 2010 election:

  • Populus's samples normally have 23% people who voted Conservative at the last election, 19% people who voted Labour, 15% who voted Lib Dem, 42% who voted for other parties, didn't vote or won't say. This equates to CON 37%, LAB 30%, LDEM 23%.
  • ICM's samples normally have 23% people who voted Conservative at the last election, 19% people who voted Labour, 14% who voted Lib Dem, 44% who voted for other parties, didn't vote or won't say. This, again, equates to CON 37%, LAB 30%, LDEM 23%.
  • ComRes's samples normally have 23% people who voted Conservative at the last election, 19% people who voted Labour, 14% who voted Lib Dem, 44% who voted for other parties, didn't vote or won't say. This, again, equates to CON 37%, LAB 30%, LDEM 23%.
  • This month's MORI sample has 22% people who voted Conservative at the last election, 27% people who voted Labour, 14% who voted Lib Dem, 37% who voted for other parties, didn't vote or won't say. Roughly speaking (as we don't have the figure for others), this equates to CON 32%, LAB 40%, LDEM 21%.

So this month's MORI sample has significantly more people who voted Labour in 2010 than people who voted Conservative, and has about a third more 2010 Labour voters in its sample than other telephone polling companies. Unusual sample and, consequently, an unusual result.

It is important to note that this sample is NOT typical of MORI, so don't go away with the idea that MORI consistently have vastly more 2010 Labour voters in their samples than 2010 Conservative voters - they don't. Most of the time MORI's samples are far more in line with other companies and their results are also normally very much in line. It's just this month's sample that's wacky.

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