Tonight we are due at least three polls – the monthly online ComRes poll for the Independent on Sunday & Sunday Mirror, the fortnightly Opinium poll for the Observer and the weekly YouGov poll for the Sunday Times. I believe there may also be a Survation poll for the Mail on Sunday plus, of course, any ad hoc polls that newspapers have commissioned on the back of the referendum announcement in the week. We had our first poll conducted entirely after Cameron’s referendum announcement yesterday, and that didn’t show any obvious impact… but as ever, that was only one poll. We’ll have a much better idea tonight. I’ll update as the polls come in.
UPDATE: ComRes’s monthly online poll has topline figures of CON 33%(+5), LAB 39%(nc), LDEM 11%(+2), UKIP 10%(-4). Changes are from their last online poll in December. There is also an improvement in David Cameron’s own figures – 32% agreed with the statement that he was turning out to be a good Prime Minister (up 5 from a month ago), 46% disagreed (down 6).
UPDATE2: The ComRes tables are now up here. Regular readers may remember that last month ComRes changed their methodology so that when they weighted by likelihood to vote, they treated the minor parties the same as all the other parties (previously they only included BNP, Green and UKIP voters if they said they were 10/10 certain to vote, but included Tory, Lab and LD voters who were 5+/10 likely to vote, weighted proportionally). The effect was to give UKIP a hefty boost. Well, looking at this month’s tables it looks to me as if they’ve reversed the change, and gone back to only including UKIP voters who are 10/10 certain to vote. If that is the case, it would suggest a lot of the increase in UKIP’s support in ComRes’s poll last month, and their drop in support this month, is just switching methodology back and forth.
UPDATE3: By my rough, back-of-a-fag-packet reckoning, if ComRes had used the methodology they used last month they’d have shown topline figures of CON 32%, LAB 37%, LD 11%, UKIP 13% – so it would still have shown a Conservative increase, but UKIP would have suffered a smaller drop, with Labour also falling slightly.
UPDATE4: The fortnightly Opinium poll for the Observer has topline figures of CON 28%(-3), LAB 41%(nc), LDEM 8%(+1), UKIP 14%(+2). Unlike the ComRes poll, which was done between Wednesday and Friday, so wholly after Cameron’s referendum speech, the Opinium poll was done between Tuesday and Thursday and, according to the Observer, most of the fieldwork was completed before news of the speech.
UPDATE5: According to Sky the Survation poll in the Mail on Sunday has topline figures of CON 31%(+2), LAB 38%(nc), LDEM 10%(-1), UKIP 14%(-2). The movement is in the direction of the Conservatives, but the changes are all well within the margin of error. The other poll due tonight is YouGov in the Sunday Times, but that often doesn’t surface till the morning. I’ve seen mention of an Angus Reid poll in the Sunday Express too, but no idea what that shows or if it even exists.
