Lord Ashcroft re-visits some Con-Lab marginals
Lord Ashcroft released a new batch of constituency polls this afternoon, this time returning to ten Conservative -vs- Labour seats where he found a tight battle last time round. Full details are here.
I normally look at the average swing across the groups of seats that Lord Ashcroft polls, but I'd be wary of reading too much into that this time. Because Lord Ashcroft has gone back to the tight races, these are seats that were showing a smaller than average swing before (an average of 2 points from Con to Lab). They still show a lower than average swing of about 2 points...but that's probably because it's a sample made up of seats that were showing a lower swing anyway, rather than a sign of a wider pattern.
Most of the seats don't show much change in the Lab-Con race since Ashcroft previously polled them last year. The biggest differences are in Harrow East, where Labour are now ahead, and in Loughborough and Kingswood, previously tight races but now with healthier Tory leads. Most of the polls showed a drop in UKIP support, but none of these are UKIP target seats and the previous wave of polling in most of these seats was Sep-Oct when UKIP were on a Carswell related high, so this is to be expected. A positive finding for Labour in these seats is that they are ahead in the ground war - on average 71% of people recall being contacted by Labour over the last few weeks, compared to 59% who recall being contacted by the Tories.
Elsewhere, last night's YouGov poll for the Sun had topline figures of CON 33%, LAB 35%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 14%, GRN 5% (tabs). Nothing particularly unusual, but note that YouGov are now on their election footing, meaning they weight by likelihood to vote in a similar way to ICM and Ashcroft polls (so people who say they are 10/10 certain to vote get a weight of 1.0, people who say they are 9/10 likely to vote get a weight of 0.9 and so on). In past elections this has tended to slightly favour the Conservatives, but this time round it isn't actually making any substantial difference at all. YouGov have also changed their sampling slightly - taking samples from people who polled in January and February (a period when Labour had a very slight lead in the polls) and weighting them using Jan/Feb vote, rather than party ID from back in 2010.
It also means they are now seven days a week, so we'll be getting a fresh YouGov poll every night up until the election.
