Tories down in March ComRes poll

ComRes's monthly poll for the Independent has topline voting intentions with changes from last month of CON 38%(-3), LAB 31%(+1), LDEM 17%(nc). Unlike ICM and YouGov's polls since the budget, there is no obvious Conservative leap here, in fact, their lead over Labour has narrowed and they are back under 40%. The poll was conducted between the 28th and 30th of March.

This is not, necessarily, a change in public opinion though. Long time readers will remember that we used to coment on ComRes's lack of political weighting. Well, they do now weight by past vote and have done for several months, but the way they do it seems very strange since their target weights change significantly from month to month. ComRes aren't unusually pro-Labour, which was one result of not weighting politically, but they haven't seemed to have made their samples much less volatile, which is normally seen as the benefit of political weighting.

In last months' poll that showed an 11 point Tory lead, 19% of the total sample (including non-voters) said they had voted Conservative back in 2005. This month, only 17% of the sample said they voted Conservative back in 2005 - so, the Tories are down, but it's a less Tory sample.