Latest Populus and Ashcroft polls

This morning's Populus poll had topline figures of CON 32%, LAB 37%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 13%. The five point Labour lead is up from Friday's poll which had the two parties equal on 35%... but both polls are inline with the average lead of 3 points or so which Populus have been showing lately.

I've seen it suggested lately that there's a pattern of Populus producing better figures for Labour in their Monday polls, better figures for the Conservatives in Friday polls. Such a pattern is possible in theory - one can imagine that you might get slightly different respondents from weekend fieldwork than weekday fieldwork - and on the face of it looks like there could have been a bit of a pattern last month. Crunching the data properly though any difference appears to be minimal - the average figures this year for Populus's Friday polls are CON 33.4%, LAB 36.5%; for Monday polls they are CON 33.1%, LAB 36.9%. Populus's Monday polls give a Labour lead that's 0.7% bigger than Friday polls, less than a percentage point.

Meanwhile Lord Ashcroft's poll shows another big change in Tory support from last week. Toplines are CON 27%(-5), LAB 36%(nc), LDEM 7%(nc), UKIP 17%(+3), GRN 7%(+1). I wrote about the volatility in Lord Ashcroft's polling a couple of weeks ago here: essentially, there's no methodological reason for it, nor are the figures actually particularly volatile given the standard levels of variation you'd expect to find. As ever, it's the underlying trend that counts rather than the individual bits of data that make it up.