Things that have happened in recent polling

We've had a few interesting things in Opinium polling over the last few weeks.

The first is that we asked who voters think is likely to win the next general election with all the realistic options being shown (i.e. Conservative majority, hung parliament with Conservatives as the largest party, hung parliament with Labour as the largest party, Labour majority). We asked this back in March and again in September and the major difference is that the Conservatives are a lot more confident of victory than they were six months ago.

Counting a majority or being the largest party in a hung parliament as a "win" for each side, 54% in March expected a Labour win in 2015 vs. just 24% for the Conservatives. In September the figures were 42% and 37% respectively with the main difference coming from the fact that more Conservative voters expect a win.

We also had a look at intra-party approval ratings (e.g. how many supporters of a party approve / disapprove of their leader) and why Ed Miliband's ratings have tumbled recently. My theory about why Labour voters were suddenly less positive than usual about their leader was that this was because of media criticism of Miliband by people from his own side (e.g. John Prescott) which wouldn't make Labour voters any less likely to vote Labour but would make them less likely to approve of their leader.

It also mentions why I thought Ed Miliband's own-party ratings were lower than those for David Cameron and, given that we've just had a Labour party conference where the main announcements were policies that the Labour base will love, it'll be interesting to see what happens to his figures in the weeks ahead.