–Updates Daily UK Election Item; Adds First Poll Since Brown Gaffe

LONDON (MNI), April 29 – The first poll carried out after UK Prime
Minister Gordon Brown’s high profile blunder on the electoral campaign
shows Labour support holding steady.

The daily YouGov poll for the Sun newspaper, released Thursday
evening, puts Labour on 27%, the Conservatives on 34% and the Liberal
Democrats on 28%. The Labour support is unchanged from the previous
YouGov poll, largely carried out prior to the blunder, and down 2
percentage points on the poll prior to that.

On Wednesday, Brown called a supporter who quizzed him about
immigration a “bigot”, generating a flurry of national and international
media attention but it has had no clear impact on the YouGov polls.

The plethora of UK polls still appear to show the UK on track for
no party to secure an overall majority in the May 6 election, although
the Conservative vote has tended to firm up slightly in recent polls.

High Profile US Psephologist Sees No Overall Majority

Nate Silver, the statistician and psephologist who became well
known for his US electoral forecasts, has revised his projections for
the UK election outcome, and he shows the opposition Conservative Party
falling short of an overall majority.

His latest forecast, posted on this fivethirtyeight.com website
Thursday, shows the Conservatives winning 299 parliamentary seats, 27
short of the 326 needed for an outright majority. Silver has criticised
the uniform national swing models available on a host of UK media sites,
and his team’s latest findings show the Conservatives doing better than
on the UNS models.

The UNS model on the ukpollingreport site, for example, shows the
Conservatives based on rolling poll averages falling short of an overall
majority by some 60 seats.

Silver’s work has generated increasing media interest here. The
UK’s locally based, first past the post system makes it extremely
difficult to extrapolate from national polls showing percentage support
for parties to actual vote outturns.

Silver’s model assigns votes across individual constituencies, but
he warns it is still experimental.

The final leaders debate takes place at 1930 GMT Thursday.

Thursday Polls Show Little Change

Thursday’s polls, with research conducted largely before Labour
leader Gordon Brown’s high profile gaffe on the campaign trail, show a
widening in the range of results for party support but a negligible
change in the rolling averages.

The most striking poll was one by ICM for the Guardian newspaper.
This looks at Liberal Democrat target seats and finds that of the 42
seats where it came second in the previous election in 2005, the LibDems
are ahead in the popular vote, but set to make parliamentary gains
primarily at the expense of Labour rather than the Conservatives.

The ICM poll puts LibDem support in its target seats at 39%
compared to 35% for the Conservatives and 18% for Labour. The key
finding is the Conservative support is only one percentage point down in
these constituencies from 2005. The suggestion is the Conservatives
are likely to hold on to the bulk of its seats where it is faced by the
resurgent LibDems while Labour will lose out.

The surge in the LibDem vote, from a low of 18% on April 14, to the
high 20s to low 30s now, has been the dominant theme of this campaign.
The Guardian poll, however, suggests that the upshot could simply be a
transfer of seats from Labour to the LibDems, leaving the door open to a
Conservative victory if the Tories can make gains elsewhere from Labour.

The ICM poll implies a swing in the marginals of 8% from Labour to
the Liberal Democrats, with a negligible swing from the Conservatives to
the Liberal Democrats.

The Guardian suggests the Liberal Democrats could increase their
total number of Members of Parliament to “at least 80″ compared with 63
in 2005, but with 650 seats up for grabs that still leaves the door open
to an overall Conservative majority.

The three National polls out Thursday put Conservative support in a
32% to 36% range, Labour in a 25% to 29% range and the Liberal Democrats
in a 26% to 31% range.

The 10 poll average shows no change for the Conservatives, at
33.6%, up a percentage point from the 2005 election and a slight dip in
Liberal Democrat support to 29%, up 6.8 points from 2005 with Labour at
27.5%, down 8 points from 2005.

The full impact, if any, of Brown’s recorded description Wednesday
of a supporter who asked him about immigration as a “bigot”, which has
been endlessly replayed in the national media, will only show up in full
in polls taken Thursday onwards.

The following table shows the most recent national polls with a 10
poll average.

End !Pollster!Media !Labour! Conservative!Liberal !Conservative!
Date of! !Outlet ! ! !Democrat!Lead Over !
Survey ! ! ! ! ! !Labour !
————————————————————————
29-Apr YouGov Sun 27 34 28 7
28-Apr Harris Metro 25 32 30 7
28-Apr YouGov Sun 27 34 31 7
28-Apr ComRes ITV 29 36 26 7
27-Apr Populus Times 27 36 28 9
27-Apr YouGov Sun 29 33 28 4
27-Apr ComRes ITV 29 33 29 4
26-Apr YouGov Sun 28 33 29 5
26-Apr Opinium Express 25 34 28 9
26-Apr ICM Guardian 28 33 30 5
26-Apr ComRes ITV 28 32 31 4

————————————————————————
10 poll average 27.4 33.8 28.7 6.4
————————————————————————

–London newsroom: 4420 7862 7491 email:ukeditorial@marketnews.com

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