Updates from the other place

Things have been a little quiet here but I've had a few pieces up on the work site and there should be a new one every Monday.

Some recent highlights:

John Rentoul at the Independent on Sunday asked the heads of all the regular polling companies to give their predictions for the general election (a poll of pollsters). Ours is on the page for that article but there's a bit more explaining why we said what we said here. There's also an interesting post here by the team at Survation on their prediction.

At the start of February we rolled out some methodology changes for our general election polling. To overdramatise significantly we're moving from 'peacetime' (i.e. mid-term between elections) to 'wartime' (the informal and formal election campaign periods) so I wrote a little explainer of the changes here.

We did a little work on tactical voting and whether people had chosen their parties because they like them or dislike someone else. It's impossible to measure particularly closely but I think we get a flavour here of what voters would do in different situations where their party isn't really in contention.

I also had two related blog posts about the central conundrum in election polling at the moment. Namely that Labour lead in most polls despite trailing badly on the other traditional predictors of elections: leader ratings and who you trust to handle the economy. The first basically lays out that situation in more detail while the second comes after we first showed the Tories leading in voting intention (albeit within the margin of error). While the economy is affecting how people will vote, it's quite a nuanced subject so we've tried to come up with a way of measuring that in a way that, coincidentally, tracks vote share. More details in the post itself.