New Populus and MORI polls
Hi - still offline most of the time, but here's a quick update on the two polls that are out today.
Populus's December poll had topline figures of CON 40% (+4), LAB 32% (-5), LDEM 16% (nc). The poll was conducted between the 7th and 9th of December.
Populus's methodology tends to produce figures that are slightly better for Labour than, say, ICM or YouGov - in fact, they are the only pollster who until now had not shown the Conservatives back in the lead. There isn't any nice formula you can plug a poll into and say "well, an 8 point Populus lead is thesameas an X point ICM lead", but 40% for the Tories in a Populus poll is a good thing from Populus. The picture heeis much as we've seen elsewhere, the Tories advancing up into the 40s, Labour falling into the low 30s and the Lib Dems back off the canvas but now semingto be somewhere around the mid teens, depending on the pollster.
Ipsos MORI's political monitor for December has topline voting intention figures of CON 42%
(+1), LAB 35% (+3), LDEM 14% (-3). The poll was conducted between 29th November and 7th December.
The figures here would appear to show Labour recovering, in contrast to all other polls. In recent days the news coverage has moved away from negative stories about the government to obsess over canoe man, and if this poll was very recent I'd guess it was a genuine recovery. Given some of it is almost a fortnight old and Populu's more recent findings, I suspect the changes are more down to the fact that last month's MORI poll was done on the phone omnibus while they reviewed their sampling points, rather than their standard face-to-face interviews (or even just random sampling error).
