Tuesday round up

D minus 23 Today's polls: YouGov/Sun (12th-13th Apr) CON 39%(nc), LAB 31%(-2), LDEM 20%(nc) Populus/Times (12th-13th Apr) CON 36%(-3), LAB 33%(+1), LDEM 21%(nc) ComRes/Independent/ITV (11th-12th Apr) CON 36%(-1), LAB 31%(+1), LDEM 19%(-1) Angus Reid/Political Betting (11th-12th Apr) CON 38%(+1), LAB 28%(+2), LDEM 22%(nc)

Four new polls tonight. The one that will get the most attention is Populus, who have the lead right down to 3 points, however the sad truth is polls that show the extreme leads and the sharp movements get the attention from the media, but they are no more likely to be right than the rather dull ones not showing much movement at all (if anything, it's the other way round).

While Populus and ComRes are showing the polls narrowing, YouGov's poll tonight shows it widening again - back to the sort of figures they were showing last week - so we have some conflicting patterns, and a lot of this back and forth is probably just random sample error. On top of that, we are actually in a rather turbulent time - yesterday Labour got a good boost of media coverage from their manifesto launch, today the Conservatives have, tomorrow the Lib Dems will and then we are straight into the first debate.

In other news, we've had a ComRes poll for the Indy&ITV two days in a row now. This is apparently part of a daily poll by them for 3 days a week - Monday to Wednesday. I am assuming that this rather strange rota is because there isn't a News at Ten on Saturday and Sunday and there are leaders debates on Thursdays. Why they aren't doing Friday I don't know!

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