Survation/Mail on Sunday - CON 37, LAB 45, LDEM 6
Survation have a poll in today's Mail on Sunday. Topline figures are CON 37%(-1), LAB 45%(+1), LDEM 6%(-1). Fieldwork was Thursday and Friday and changes are since early October.
The eight point Labour lead is the largest any poll has shown since the election, so has obviously attracted some attention. As regular readers will know, Survation carry out both telephone and online polls. Their telephone method is unique to them, so could easily explain getting different results (Ipsos MORI still use phone polling, but they phone randomly generated numbers (random digit dialling), as opposed to Survation who phone actual numbers randomly selected from telephone databases). However, this was an online poll, and online there is nothing particularly unusual about Survation's online method that might explain the difference. Survation use an online panel like all the other online polls, weight by very similar factors like age, gender, past vote, referendum vote and education, use self-reported likelihood to vote and exclude don't knows. There are good reasons why their results are better for Labour than those from pollsters showing the most Tory results like Kantar and ICM (Kantar still use demographics in their turnout model, ICM reallocate don't knows) but the gap compared to results from MORI and YouGov don't have such an easy explanation.
Looking at the nuts and bolts of the survey, there's nothing unusual about the turnout or age distribution. The most striking thing that explains the strong Labour position of the poll is that Survation found very few people who voted Labour in 2017 saying they don't know how they would vote now. Normally even parties who are doing well see a chunk of their vote from the last election now saying they aren't sure what they would do, but only 3% of Labour's 2017 vote told Survation they weren't sure how they would vote in an election, compared to about 10% in other polls. Essentially, Survation are finding a more robust Labour vote.
Two other interesting findings worth highlighting. One is a question on a second referendum - 50% said they would support holding a referendum asking if people supported the terms of a Brexit deal, 34% said they would be opposed. This is one of those questions that get very different answers depending on how you ask it - there are plenty of other questions that find opposition, and I'm conscious this question does not make it clear whether it would be a referendum on "accept deal or stay in EU", "accept deal or continue negotiations" or "accept deal or no deal Brexit". Some of these would be less popular than others. Nevertheless, the direction of travel is clear - Survation asked the same question back in April when there was only a five point lead for supporting a referendum on the deal, now that has grown to sixteen points (50% support, 34% opposed).
Finally there was a question on whether Donald Trump's visit to the UK should go ahead. 37% think it should, 50% think it should not. This echoes a YouGov poll yesterday which found 31% think it should go ahead, 55% think it should not. I mention this largely as an antidote to people being mislead by twitter polls suggesting people want the visit to go ahead - all recent polls with representative samples suggest the public are opposed to a visit.
Tabs for the Survation poll are here.
