Populus and ICM show Labour ahead in Oldham East & Saddleworth

Tonight there will be the usual YouGov/Sunday Times poll and there may be others I don't know about... but the polls that will be getting the attention are those on the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election. I think there are three - Survation, Populus in the Sunday Telegraph (commissioned by Lord Ashcroft) and ICM in the Mail on Sunday.

The first out of the stocks (with changes from the General Election) are the ICM and Populus polls

ICM have CON 18%(-8), LAB 44%(+12), LDEM 27%(-5) Populus have CON 15%(-11), LAB 46%(+14), LDEM 29(-3)

So both have Labour substantially up on their general election support and the Lib Dems dropping less than the third placed Conservatives. Rumour has it that the third poll, from Survation, has a bigger squeeze on the Conservative vote with them pushed down to single figures. I'll update ob that later.

There has been some suggestion that the ICM poll did not include the candidates names in the voting intention question. I've seen nothing to confirm this, but do know that Populus prompted by party & candidate name and the two polls are showing almost identical pictures anyway. Also note that ICM only had a sample of 500 respondents, while Populus asked 1,500.

UPDATED: There is more data from the Populus poll here on ConHome and especially in an analysis by Lord Ashcroft here in the Sunday Telegraph.

The story of the by-election is basically there - almost a third of people who voted Lib Dem in May 2010 have defected directly to Labour, and those defecting Lib Dems are the most hostile to the coalition in the other questions asked (more so than existing Labour voters!). However, this slump in Liberal Democrat support is partially offset by widespread tactical voting by Conservative supporters, with around a third of people who voted Tory in May 2010 now saying they'll vote Liberal Democrat.

Populus asked people about levels of campaigning in the by-election. The Labour and Lib Dem campaigns seem broadly equal - just over 70% recall getting leaflets from the two parties, about 20% have been doorstepped by them, about 20% have been phoned by them. In comparison only 57% have had a Conservative leaflet, 7% had them on their doorstep and 5% been phoned by them.

Populus also asked how people would have voted had there been a joint Con-LD candidate - I make the repercentaged figures for that Lab 47%, Con/LD 38% - so it would have been a little closer. 77% of Conservative voters would have voted for the joint candidate, two-thirds of Lib Dem voters would have (of course, these aren't directly comparable because we don't know who this imaginary joint candidate would be, what happens to people who were voting because they thought Elwyn Watkins or Kashif Ali were the best candidate?).