From the recent YouGov poll for Channel 4:

Which daily newspaper do you read most often?
42% Express / Mail / Mirror / Record / Sun / Star
25% No newspaper
18% FT / Guardian / Independent / Times / Telegraph
15% Other

Today is (in case you hadn’t realised) polling day – for much of England that means local elections, for everyone it means European elections – which means it’s our last chance to look at the polls for the Euros, and try and make some sense of them. There have been 11 polls in the last month asking voters to say which party they’ll choose on 4th June:

Here they are in chronological order:

>> Con 37%, Lab 22%, Lib Dem 19%, Ukip 7%, Green 4%, BNP 4%, Nats 5% (YouGov certain to vote, 10th May)
>> Con 34%, Lab 25%, Lib Dem 20%,

…

An interesting snippet from today’s YouGov poll:

Here are some proposals that have been made for reforming our political system. In each case do you agree or disagree with it?

Introduce a new voting system for electing MPs which would link the number of seats to the total vote of each party, and make it harder for a single party to win general elections outright.

Support: 52%
Oppose: 20%

Amongst Conservative voters:

Support: 40%
Oppose: 33%

Not surprisingly, Liberal Democrat voters are much keener, but it’s interesting to note that a majority of Conservatives agreed with this question.

The other question that particularly caught my eye was on MPs’ pay, where the …

Lib Dem Voice doesn’t do polls. But if it did, we would draw readers’ attention to two rather different recent surveys of opinion.

On Friday, Populus suggested a surge for UKIP — who would relegate Labour to third place and leave the Lib Dems fighting it out with the Green party for fourth place.

Sunday’s papers will bring a new ICM poll putting us at 25% at Westminster and 20% in the European elections – in both cases relegating Labour to third place in the popular vote.

Are they both outliers? Political Betting’s sage Mike Smithson offers …

Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:

May 12th saw voting in the British Columbia elections. This Canadian provincial election saw Gordon Campbell’s governing Liberals re-elected and also a few barbs thrown about internet polling. As in the UK, internet polling has both its fans and its detractors. So does the Canadian experience help shed any light on the UK polling debates?

Perhaps the most striking fact about Canadian pollsters is that they haven’t yet had a “1970″. In Britain, pollsters got the 1970 general election badly wrongly with much of the blame being placed on having fieldwork that ended too far ahead …

We’re mid-way through the campaign for the European Parliament elections – though, as yet, discussion of Britain’s role in the EU has not been the, erm, dominant story. But, still, there have been five polls to date in May specifically asking for the public’s Euro voting intentions, so let’s check out what they’ve been saying:

Here they are in chronological order:

…

We tend not to be too poll-obsessed here at LDV – of course we look at them, as do all other politico-geeks, but viewed in isolation no one poll will tell you very much beyond what you want to read into it. Looked at over a reasonable time-span and, if there are enough polls, you can see some trends.

Here, in chronological order, are the results of the eight polls published in March:

Tories 42%, Labour 30%, Lib Dems 19% – Populus/Times (9th March 2009)
Tories 41%, Labour 31%, Lib Dems 17% – YouGov/S. Times (15th March)
Tories 42%, Labour 32%, Lib Dems 14%

…

Appearing on the BBC earlier today, David Laws made the point that the Conservative Party’s lead in the opinion polls is fairly modest at the moment compared with Labour’s in the run-up to 1997.

This led Mike Smithson to blog:

Why’s the LD schools spokesman getting it so wrong?

You’ll have to indulge me if you think I’ve banged on about this too much – but I have a real “bee in my bonnet” about the phoney invalid polling comparisons that journos, pundits and politicians are rushing to make when they compare the polling position at the moment with what went on

…

BBC Wales has commissioned an opinion poll from ICM, which contains this:

Who do you think forms the current Welsh Assembly Government?

Labour and Plaid Cymru 48%
Labour 21%
Plaid Cymru 6%
Labour and the Liberal Democrats 5%
Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats 3%
Liberal Democrats 2%
Conservatives 2%
Other 2%
Don’t know 11%

We tend not to be too poll-obsessed here at LDV – of course we look at them, as do all other politico-geeks, but viewed in isolation no one poll will tell you very much beyond what you want to read into it. Looked at over a reasonable time-span and, if there are enough polls, you can see some trends.

Here, in chronological order, are the results of the seven polls published in February:

Tories 40%, Labour 28%, Lib Dems 22% – ICM/S. Telegraph (8th Feb 2009)
Tories 42%, Labour 28%, Lib Dems 18% – Populus/Times (10th Feb)
Tories 41%, Labour 25%, Lib Dems 22% – ComRes/S. Independent (15th Feb)
Tories 44%, Labour 32%, Lib Dems 14% – YouGov/S. Times (15th Feb)
Tories 48%, Labour 28%, Lib Dems 17% – Mori/unpublished (17th Nov)
Tories 42%, Labour 30%, Lib Dems 18% – ICM/Guardian (24th Nov)
Tories 41%, Labour 31%, Lib Dems 15% – YouGov/Telegraph (27th Nov)

Which gives us an average rating for the parties in February as follows, compared with January’s averages:

Tories 43% (n/c), Labour 29% (-3%), Lib Dems 18% (+2%)

What to make of this month’s polls, which paradoxically convey both stability and fluctuation? The Tories seem to be relatively stable, in the low 40s% – except for Mori which elevates them to 48%, touching the heights of New Labour before its landslide. Labour appear relatively stable, hovering just at or below 30% – except for ComRes which relegates them to 25%, only a margin of error’s breadth ahead of the Lib Dems. And the Lib Dems seem to be relatively stable in the 17-22% range – except for YouGov which sees the party stuck firmly at a pretty paltry 14-15%.

All this statistical noise is, of course, ironed out by our monthly average, which sees Labour ceding ground to the Lib Dems. Indeed, it seems a lifetime ago, but just back in December Labour’s poll average was 35%: they have dropped 6% in the space of just a few weeks, with the spoils evenly shared between the Lib Dems and Tories.

Such has been Labour’s decline that it has prompted a brief effervescence of speculation that Gordon Brown might be tempted to resign if he thought it would assist his party’s fortunes. This prompted ICM to ask the question on behalf of The Guardian: ‘Putting aside your own political party preference for a moment do you think Labour will do better at the next general election with Gordon Brown in charge, or with another leader?’

The Daily Telegraph today has its regular monthly YouGov poll. They’ve headlined their report:

Immigration is top issue for both Labour and Tory voters, YouGov poll shows

They go on to say:

A Daily Telegraph/YouGov survey shows that it is the top concern that people want an incoming Conservative government to deal with.

Problem is, that isn’t really what the poll says.

One of the plus points of the paper using a polling firm that is a member of the British Polling Council is that we can get ready access to much fuller information than that in the report. If you have a look …

[Start polling details]

At tonight’s launch of a Microsoft/Hansard Society report into MPs’ use of the internet, The Times’s Peter Riddell revealed an interesting snippet of information about YouGov’s panel for its political polls might be: YouGov decided it couldn’t do any polls during the Glasgow East by-election because it had only around 100 panel members in the constituency, and they were overwhelmingly public sector workers – i.e. a very atypical cross-section.

[End polling details]

Last Thursday, The Guardian’s G2 section carried this rather surprising claim:

According to Keep Britain Tidy, we write more letters to our elected representatives, locally and in Westminster, about dog fouling than we do about anything else.

I did a bit of a double-take when I read it because, in my time, I’ve both dealt with quite a lot of correspondence from the public to elected representatives, worked closely with people who have dealt with even more correspondence and trained people who have dealt with yet more correspondence. And I’ve never got a hint that this is anywhere close to being true. …

It’s a well-established pattern during this Parliament that YouGov generally gives lower ratings to the Liberal Democrats than other pollsters, and this appears to be due to YouGov finding female voters to be more Conservative than other polling companies. Whilst YouGov did well in last year’s London Mayor elections, its record in other elections is more mixed. Most notably, its exist poll at the last European elections got the Conservative and UKIP vote shares badly wrong.

Interesting then to see Ben Goldacre’s column in yesterday’s Guardian which, on the way to rubbishing the PR of an insurance company, took to …

The internet seems to have got a bit excited about the latest ICM poll, something which The Voice tends not to do, but given my past complaints about the media and polling it seems only fair to point out that the Sunday Telegraph looks to have given up its brief flirtation with a non-British Polling Council firm (a flirtation I criticised at the time).

Moreover, the paper’s report sensibly compares the poll results with the previous ICM poll, even though that was commissioned for (shock! horror!) a different newspaper. The tendency to airbrush out polls carried …

We tend not to be too poll-obsessed here at LDV – of course we look at them, as do all other politico-geeks, but viewed in isolation no one poll will tell you very much beyond what you want to read into it. Looked at over a reasonable time-span and, if there are enough polls, you can see some trends.

Here, in chronological order, are the results of the eight polls published in January:

Tories 41%, Labour 34%, Lib Dems 15% – YouGov/The Sun (9 Jan)
Tories 43%, Labour 33%, Lib Dems 15% – Populus/The Times

…