YouGov/Times - REMAIN 44%, LEAVE 40%

YouGov have new EU voting intention figures in today's Times - REMAIN 44%, LEAVE 40% (tabs). This is YouGov's biggest lead for remain since March. Only one of YouGov's last eight polls has shown Leave ahead, so while the regular ICM online polls have a consistent small lead for Leave, YouGov's online polls are on average showing a small lead for Remain.

Part of today's poll is due to a methodology change, reintroducing party ID as a weight in addition to past vote. While YouGov's polls for Scottish, Welsh and London elections earlier this month generally performed very well, there was a consistent overstatement of UKIP support compared to what actually happened. Adding party ID weighting back in addresses that (essentially comparing the YouGov data to the British Election Study data suggested that even with past vote weighting, there were two few people who said they normally identified with "mainstream" parties like Lab & Con, and too many who normally identified with "challenger" parties like UKIP & Grn. This puts that right). The change does does favour Remain a little - in this poll it changed the topline figures by a point, moving it from a three point lead for Remain to a four point lead for Remain.

There was also a new ORB telephone poll yesterday for the Telegraph, which had topline figures of REMAIN 55%, LEAVE 40%, Don't know 5% (details are here), and there are new Ipsos MORI figures to come in the Evening Standard later, which Ben Page says are "interesting"...