There are two new voting intention polls in the Sunday papers, tackling the issue of measuring TIG support in different ways…

Deltapoll for the Mail on Sunday have standard voting intentions of CON 43%, LAB 36%, LDEM 6%, UKIP 5%. Respondents were then asked how they would vote if The Independent Group put up candidates at the next election – voting intention under those circumstances switches to CON 39% (four points lower), LAB 31%(five points lower), TIF 11%, LDEM 5%(one point lower). The implication is that the Independent Group are taking some support from both Labour and Conservative though, as we saw with the YouGov poll earlier in the week, it’s not necessarily as simple as a direct transfer – part of the difference may well be people saying don’t know. Fieldwork was between Thurs and Saturday, full results are here.

Opinium for the Observer meanwhile only asked their standard voting intention question, but have begun including TIG in that. This flags up an interesting dilemma for polling companies. The Independent Group are obviously not a political party. While the widespread expectation is that at some point in the future they will become a political party, they aren’t registered as one yet, and aren’t putting up candidates yet. This means that most polling companies are asking hypothetical questions about the level of support they would get if they did stand, but are not currently including them in standard voting questions.

Opinium however are offering them as a current option – presumably their thinking is that it’s only a matter of time before they register and if poll respondents’ intention is already to vote for them when they do, they should register it. The approach Opinium has taken will clearly be the correct way to do it once the TIG do evolve into a political party, the question is whether it’s too early to do it now. Either way, for what it’s worth Opinium’s first polling figures with TIG included as an option are CON 40%(+3), LAB 32%(-5), LDEM 5%(-3), TIG 6%(+6), UKIP 7%(nc). Fieldwork was Wednesday to Friday, and changes are from a week ago. Full results are here.

To be complete, as well as the SkyData and Survation polls I’ve already written about here, which showed TIG support at 10% and 8% respectively, there was also a YouGov poll midweek. That found standard topline figures of CON 41%, LAB 33%, LDEM 10% and hypothetical figures of CON 38%, LAB 26%, LDEM 7%, TIG 14% (full write up is here. Overall that means, depending on the different questions asked and approaches taken, the initial level of support for the TIG seems to be between 6% and 14%.

Rather than their usual poll for the Times, this week YouGov have a full MRP model of voting intention (that is, the same method that YouGov used for their seat projection at the general election). Topline voting intention figures from the YouGov MRP model are CON 39%, LAB 34%, LDEM 11%, UKIP 5%. The fieldwork was Sun-Thursday last week, with just over 40,000 respondents.

The aim of an MRP model is not really the vote shares though, the whole point of the technique is project shares down to seat level, and project who would win each seat. The model currently has the Conservatives winning 321 seats, Labour 250, the Liberal Democrats 16 and the SNP 39. Compared to the 2017 election the Conservatives would make a net gain of just 4 seats, Labour would lose 12 seats, the Liberal Democrats would gain 4 and the SNP would gain 4. It would leave the Conservatives just shy of an overall majority (though in practice, given Sinn Fein do not take their seats and the Speaker and Deputies don’t vote, they would have a majority of MPs who actually vote in the Commons). Whether an extra four seats would really help that much is a different question.

The five point lead it shows for the Conservatives is a swing of 1.4% to the Conservatives – very small, but on a pure uniform swing it would be enough for the Tories to get a proper overall majority. The reason they don’t here is largely because the model shows Labour outperforming in the ultra-marginal seats they won off the Conservatives at the last election (a well known phenomenon – they gain the personal vote of the new Labour MP, lose any incumbency bonus from the former Tory MP. It is the same reason the Conservatives failed to gain a meaningful number of seats in 2001, despite a small swing in their favour).

For those interested in what MRP actually is, YouGov’s detailed explanation from the 2017 election is here (Ben Lauderdale & Jack Blumenau, who created the model for the 2017 election, also carried out this one). The short version is that it is a technique designed to allow projection of results at smaller geographical levels (in this case, individual constituencies). It works by modelling respondents’ voting intention based on their demographics and the political circumstances in each seat, and then applying the model to the demographics of each of the 632 seats in Great Britain. Crucially, of course, it also called the 2017 election correctly, when most of the traditional polls ended up getting it wrong.

Compared to more conventional polling the Conservative lead is similar to that in YouGov’s recent traditional polls (which have shown Tory leads of between 5-7 points of late), but has both main parties at a lower level. Partly this is because it’s modelling UKIP & Green support in all seats, rather than in just the constituencies they contested in 2017 (when the MRP was done at the last election it was after nominations had closed, so it only modelled the actual parties standing in each seat) – in practice their total level of support would likely be lower.

The Times’s write up of the poll is here, details from YouGov are here and technical details are here

Opinium’s fortnightly poll in the Observer today has topline voting intention figures of CON 41%(+4), LAB 34%(-6), LDEM 8%(+1), UKIP 7%(nc). Fieldwork was between Wednesday and Friday, and changes are from Opinium’s previous poll in mid-January, conducted straight after May lost her vote on the deal, but won her no confidence vote.

A seven point Conservative lead is the largest since the election. While it is not significantly larger than the 5 or 6 point leads YouGov have been showing this month, it’s a noticable change to Opinium’s previous recent polls, which have tended to show Labour and Conservative roughly neck-and-neck.

As ever, one should be a little cautious about reading too much into a single poll. Survation’s poll for Thursday’s Daily Mail had fieldwork conducted on Wednesday, so actually overlaps the fieldwork period for this poll and showed a one point Labour lead with no meaningful swing from Labour to Conservative. It would be wise to wait and see if subsequent polls confirm whether public opinion has shifted against Labour, or whether this is just an outlier.

Also, be cautious about reading too much into what has caused the change. We really don’t know if there has been a change yet, let alone exactly where it has come from and why (not that it will stop people assuming things). It has been two weeks since Opinium’s last poll, and an awful lot has happened – so one cannot pin the change on any one specific event. Neither can cross-breaks really give much guidance (as Michael Savage notes in the Observer, Labour are down among both remainers and leavers… though discerning any signal from the noise of crossbreaks would be difficult even if the change was all on one side).

The full tables from Opinium are here.