Sunday polls round-up
Four voting intention polls in the Sunday papers.
YouGov/Sunday Times - CON 39%(+3), LAB 26%(+1), LDEM 17%(nc), BREX 10%(-1) (tabs) Deltapoll/Mail on Sunday - CON 41%(+1), LAB 29%(+1), LDEM 16%(+2), BREX 6%(-5) (tabs) Opinium/Observer - CON 41%(-1), LAB 29%(+3), LDEM 15%(-1), BREX 6%(-3) (tabs) Panelbase - CON 40%(nc), LAB 30%(+1), LDEM 15%(+1), BREX 8%(-1) (tabs)
In most cases changes are from last week, YouGov's changes are from their midweek poll for the Times & Sky. All four show the upwards trend in Labour support continuing (though given some of them also show the Conservatives gaining support, we cannot say that the Tory lead is narrowing). All four also show support for the Brexit party falling, particularly in the Deltapoll and Opinium figures. Apart from one outlier in August, 6% is the lowest the Brexit party have recorded since the European elections.
Following on from my post about MRP in the week, the Observer also reports the topline results from a second MRP model, again carried out by an organisation campaigning for tactical voting - this time Gina Miller's Remain United. The model currently predicts 347 Conservative seats, 204 Labour seats and 24 Liberal Democrat seats. In comparison the BestforBritain MRP results that Chris Hanretty scraped from their website seemed to imply a better showing for the Conservatives, with around 358 Conservatives seats and just 188 Labour and 19 Lib Dems (note that the Best for Britain model only covered England & Wales). The average vote shares in the Remain United model imply a Conservative lead of only around 6 points, so the difference in seat numbers may very well just be down to projecting a higher level of Labour support, rather than a different pattern of swings. For all the fuss about "rival tactical voting sites", by my count there are only 13 seats where RemainUnited suggest voting Labour and BestforBritain suggest voting Lib Dem.
There is a methodological explanation on the remain united website here that says it is not actually an MRP model, but an RRP model, which is apparently
"similar" to an MPR model (I don't know what the technical differences are to the approach, but the explanation they give does indeed sound very similar). The model is based on a ComRes sample of only 6097 responses, significantly smaller than the 46,000 sample that Best for Britain used and the 50,000 or so samples that YouGov were using at the last election. There was a similar ComRes/ElectoralData RRP model for the European elections earlier this year which did not perform particularly well - while it got the share of Brexit party support correct, it overstated Labour support by 10%, understated the Greens by 6% and Liberal Democrats by 5%, which would be rather a problem is your aim is to work out which remain party is best placed to win in seats. That said, the data for their European election model was collected more than a week before polling day, and they may well have finessed the model since then.
