Lord Ashcroft has produced another round of marginal polling – full details here. His last batch of polls revisited the Con-held ultra-marginals with Labour in second place. This time they deal with some Conservative held marginals with slightly larger majorities and revisit some Labour held marginals. The latter aren’t of much interest at the moment (with Labour ahead in the polls there is no realistic chance of the Conservatives gaining seats from Labour, so until and unless the Conservatives start showing a lead over Labour in national polls polling Labour-held Conservative targets is a little bit academic, though I may return to them in a future post), for the immediate future the Con-held marginals are more relevant.

Lord Ashcroft’s earlier polling of Con-marginals took the eleven Con-Lab seats with majorities under 2 percent. This round of polling took the seats with majorities between 2 and 3 percent, eight of them. The average swing across these seats was 6 points from Con to Lab, the equivalent of a 5 point Labour lead in the national polls. A little larger than in national polls at the moment but, as with Lord Ashcroft’s previous waves of polling in Conservative -v- Labour seats, not that different.

As usual with Lord Ashcroft’s polls this wasn’t a poll of a group of marginal seats, it was eight fully fledged polls of individual constituencies and looking at the individual seats spits out a few interesting findings. Lord Ashcroft used the two stage voting intention question for the constituency poll, first asking people a generic voting intention question and then asking people to consider their own constituency and the candidates likely to stand there in an attempt to squeeze out tactical or incumbency effects. Normally this has a huge effect in seats where the Liberal Democrats are in contention, and very little effect in seats where they aren’t. The effect of the two stage question here was illustrative – in four seats the Conservatives did very slightly better in the second question (what we’d expect from the incumbency effect). In Warrington South (a three way marginal) and Bedford (which has a strong local Lib Dem presence) the second question boosted the Lib Dems. In Stroud the second question boosted Labour, perhaps because the ousted Labour MP David Drew is seeking to return at the next election (Patrick Hall is also seeking to return in Bedford, where the second question also showed a slightly bigger swing to Labour). Also worth noting was the healthy performance by the Greens in Stroud, up on 12%.

A final observation: Southampton Itchen, one of the four Labour held seats, showed a swing of 0.5% from Lab to Con, putting the Conservatives and Labour neck and neck on 33%. This seems unlikely, while John Denham is standing down in Southampton Itchen the last time Ashcroft polled the seat in May it had an eight point Labour lead. A more likely explanation for the rather odd result is probably that suggested by Lord Ashcroft himself in his commentary – that Southampton Itchen has a substantial university population (students and staff) who wouldn’t have been around when the poll was conducted.

There are two new Scottish polls in Sunday’s papers, an ICM poll for the Scotland on Sunday and a Panelbase poll commissioned by the Yes campaign. These are only the second and third polls that we’ve seen conducted wholly after the debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling, the first one from Survation suggested a significant move towards NO, but these two paint a different picture.

Taking the Panelbase/Yes Scotland poll first, topline figures are YES 42%(+1), NO 46%(-2), Don’t know 12%(+1). Excluding don’t knows this works out at YES 48%(+2), NO 52%(-2). Changes are from the Panelbase/Sunday Times poll in July. Compared to last month it’s a slight move towards YES, but is not particularly significant by Panelbase’s standards: their penultimate poll also had YES on 48%, and they’ve have YES on between 46-48% since March.

The ICM poll in the Scotland on Sunday has topline figures of YES 38%(+4), NO 47%(+2), Don’t know 14%(-7). Excluding don’t knows this works out at YES 45%(+2), NO 55%(-2). It’s a bigger NO lead than Panelbase are showing, but the same modest movement towards YES. As with Panelbase, it’s not a massive change from the longer term trend – so far this year ICM have had YES between 43% and 48%, and YES 45% is right in line with the average of all ICM’s Scottish polls this year.

So, two polls, both show a modest movement towards YES since last month, but neither a significant shift from the longer term trend. What it does mean though is that the movement towards NO in Survations’s post-debate poll has not been echoed in other companies’ polls.

(Incidentally, I’m on leave this week, having a break before the long slog to the general election, so expect light blogging for the next few days)

A round up of various polling bits and bobs from the last few days, starting with a couple of Scottish polls. TNS released their latest figures yesterday, as usual there’s quite a gap between fieldwork and release – it was conduced between 23rd July and the 7th August, so overlapping with the Commonwealth games and almost wholly before the Salmond-Darling debate. Topline figures were YES 32%(nc), 45%(+4), DK 23%(-4), or without don’t knows YES 42%(-2), NO 58%(+2). It’s a shift towards NO, but it may be largely a reversion to the mean – TNS’s previous poll had NO dropping five points, so this is monstly just a reversal of that.

This week’s we’ve also seen the latest data from the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey. This is an academic project, so by the standards of media polling the figures are very old – the fieldwork was between the 12th May and 17th July – but they are worth noting because of the quality of the fieldwork. This was a proper probability sample, something extremely expensive you only normally see for academic and government work. Standard face-to-face polls aren’t really random, they use demographic quotas and cluster sampling (interviewers get sent to a place and door knock to five 3 male pensioners, 2 women under 30, etc); telephone polls are quasi-random – they ring randomised telephone numbers, but not every house has a phone and the overwhelming majority of calls don’t result in an interview; internet polls normally draw a sample from a panel. The Scottish Social Attitudes survey draws a genuine random selection of Scottish addresses and then sends a face-to-face interviewer to call at that address until they make contact and can arrange an interview, the response rate is 57% (phone polls these days are under 10%). The SSA survey found referendum voting intentions in the May-July period were YES 25%, NO 43%, Don’t know 32%, a squeeze question pushed those don’t knows to YES 33%, NO 51%, DK 15%. Excluding don’t knows that the equivalent of YES 39%, NO 61%.

Moving on, there have been a couple of polls on attitudes towards British participation in air srikes in Iraq. YouGov for the Times found 40% of people approved of the RAF taking part in airstrikes against ISIS, 36% were opposed (tabs here). ComRes for ITV found 45% of people supporting British fighter planes conducting airstrikes against Islamic State, 37% were opposed. Unsurprisingly there was strong opposition to British ground troops being sent back into Iraq – only 18% supported it in the ComRes poll. (tabs here)

Finally we have another academic election prediction site, joining Steve Fisher’s projection here and Rob Ford, Will Jennings et al’s projection here. The latest addition is from Nick Vivyan, Chris Hanretty & Ben Lauderdale at ElectionForecast.co.uk. As I write Steve is predicting a Conservative lead of 4 points at the next election, producing a hung Parliament with the Conservatives the largest party; Rob and colleagues are predicting a 0.7% Labour lead at the next election; Nick, Ben and Chris are predicting a 1.2% Conservative lead, producing a hung Parliament with Labour the largest party.