A variety of new and newish polls today.
Starting with the newest of the regular polls, Kantar‘s latest topline figures are CON 43%(+1), LAB 33%(-1), LDEM 11%(+2), UKIP 4%(nc). Fieldwork was between Thursday and Tuesday. The changes are not significant in themselves, but unlike most recent polls don’t show continuing movement towards Labour. Note also that there is a methodological change – Kantar now estimate how people who say don’t know will vote based on upon their demographics and whether they find May or Corbyn more trustworthy. The impact of this chance is to decrease the Labour vote by a point (so without it, the Conservative lead would barely have changed at all). Tables are here.
We also saw a Panelbase poll today. This is not actually new – it is the poll that was in the field during the Manchester bombing last week, which Panelbase made the decision to withhold in the light of the tragedy. Topline figures are CON 48%, LAB 33%, LDEM 7%, UKIP 4%. Fieldwork was back between the 19th and 23rd of May. I’ve not included changes as there are significant methodological changes here – Panelbase have tightened their turnout filter to only include people who say 10/10, and they reweight their voting intention question so the age matches the age profile of people who voted in 2015. As with other companies whose turnout model is based upon replicating the age profile of 2015 voters this has a substantial effect. Panelbase say without it their poll would have shown the lead narrowing by 6 points from their previous poll (implying they would otherwise be showing an eight point Tory lead on their old method!). Panelbase tabs are here. In their comments Panelbase also say they will be releasing a new poll in the next day or two which again has the Tory lead falling.
Thirdly there was a new Ipsos MORI Scottish poll. Topline voting intention there is SNP 43%, CON 25%, LAB 25%, LDEM 5%. As ever, the SNP are in a clear first place, but down from the last election. Where it had appeared that the Scottish Conservatives were now the clear second placed party, this suggests that Labour may have recovered into joint-second place (that would also be very good news for the SNP – under FPTP the SNP benefit from being the dominant pro-independence party when the unionist parties are split three ways). Full details are here.
There was also a new SurveyMonkey poll for the Sun. This has topline figures of CON 44%(nc), LAB 38%(+2), LDEM 6%(nc), UKIP 4%(-1). Now, SurveyMonkey are not members of the British Polling Council and we don’t have any tables or further methodological detail to examine. However, they did poll at the 2015 election so have a record to judge. Their method is unusual – sample is gathered by randomly selecting people at the end of other surveys hosted on the surveymonkey platform. Back in 2015 they were the only company whose pre-election poll got the Conservative lead about right…but because they got both Labour and the Conservatives too low their average error across all parties was the highest (and the BPC inquiry found that their sample was still heavily skewed towards the politically interested… though they may have corrected that since then). In short, make of that what you will – it may be that their approach does do something that traditional polling does not… or it may be they just got lucky in 2015.