By Lord Ashcroft
After more than a year and nearly a quarter of a million telephone interviews, we have reached the final round of my general election constituency polling. The last ten surveys contain mixed news for all parties and some noteworthy results (more…)
By Lord Ashcroft
Today’s batch of marginal snapshots includes three of the most intriguing and closely contested seats of this general election campaign.
South Swindon is a very tight Conservative-Labour marginal which I have polled twice before, finding a tie both times (more…)
By Lord Ashcroft
My latest round of constituency polling covers four seats in which I have previously found UKIP to be doing well. These include two seats where I found the party in second place to the Tories (Castle Point and Great Yarmouth), and two where I found them second to Labour (Cannock Chase and Great Grimsby) (more…)
By Lord Ashcroft
My latest battleground polling I have looked at six seats, three of which I have not surveyed before.
In Bristol North West, Charlotte Leslie is well ahead in the seat she won for the Conservatives in 2010 in a three-way fight with the Liberal Democrats. Elsewhere in the city, the Green Party has been heavily targeting Bristol West, a seat the Lib Dems won in 2010 with a 20-point majority over Labour (more…)
By Lord Ashcroft
In my latest round of constituency polling I have returned to Scotland. This selection includes eight seats, including five I have polled before (East Renfrewshire, Glasgow South West, Paisley & Renfrewshire South, Ross, Skye & Lochaber, and Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale & Tweeddale) and three new ones (Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk, East Dunbartonshire and North East Fife).
I wanted to know whether the SNP surge had subsided in places I had previously surveyed; whether it threatened other incumbents, especially Lib Dems; and whether there were any potential surprises in store. The answers are no, yes and yes (more…)
By Lord Ashcroft
In my last round of polling in Conservative-Labour marginals I found the Tories consolidating in most seats where they had been ahead in previous rounds, while Labour had extended their leads where they had been doing well last year. Some races were very close and Labour had taken the lead in one constituency where the Tories had been ahead in December.
The lack of a consistent pattern in the battleground has led me to look further down the Conservative defence list to see whether there could be some surprises in seats which ought, on paper, to be safer for the Tories (more…)
By Lord Ashcroft
In my latest round of battleground polling I have returned to ten Conservative-held seats where Labour are the main challengers, and in which I found very close races when I polled them last year. In the previous round there was a small Tory lead in six (Blackpool North & Cleveleys, Gloucester, Harrow East, Kingswood, Loughborough and Pendle), a small Labour lead in three (Hove, Morecambe & Lunesdale and Stockton South) and a tie in one (Pudsey).
The most notable movement across the board in this round of polling was a move towards the two main parties at the expense of UKIP, something I also found in the Liberal Democrat battleground last week (more…)
By Lord Ashcroft
In my latest round of constituency research I have returned to eight seats in the Liberal Democrats’ battleground where I found very close contests in previous rounds of polling. These included one Conservative-held seat (Camborne & Redruth), five Lib Dem seats where the Tories are second (North Cornwall, North Devon, St Austell & Newquay, St Ives, and Torbay), and two seats where the Lib Dems are challenged by Labour (Cambridge and Sheffield Hallam).
The mix of results this time round underlines the lack of any uniform swing and the hazards of trying to calculate seat numbers on the basis of national vote shares (more…)
By Lord Ashcroft
The last round of battleground polling I published found one clear Conservative lead and three very close races in seats where the Tory majority over Labour was between 8.8% and 10.6%. I therefore decided to start going back to constituencies where my previous surveys have suggested tight races to see whether narrowing national polls – including a fair number of Conservative leads – were being reflected where it matters (more…)
By Lord Ashcroft
Below is the text of the polling presentation I gave in London this evening, including my latest national poll findings and new results from marginal seats in England and Scotland. Scroll down to find the presentation slides, marginals report, and full data tables.
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Good evening and welcome. If you have ever wondered what a pollster does to celebrate his birthday, now you know. Somebody kindly asked me this morning if this was the big “four-O”, and I was compelled to admit this estimate was outside the margin of error.
This evening I will be unveiling my latest polling, both nationally and in the marginals, and giving my overview of where I think we are in the campaign that will end just nine weeks tomorrow (more…)