Lib Dems have a 3 percent lead in Eastleigh according to new Survation poll for the Mail on Sunday

Lib Dems have a 3 percent lead in Eastleigh according to new Survation poll for the Mail on Sunday

And LAB is FOURTH place behind Ukip

The second poll of the Eastleigh by-election campaign is just out. It is a telephone poll carried out by Survation for the Mail on Sunday and the broad picture it shows it quite similar to the Michael Ashcroft survey on Thursday night.

It was carried out from Wednesday until Friday compared with the Tuesday-Wednesday of the Ashcroft survey.

    Looking at the detailed numbers the big difference between the two polls is that Lib Dem voters are much more certain to vote.

In fact Survation found more LD supporters rating their certinty at between 8 and 10 out of 10 than CON ones – in very sharp contrast to Ashcroft’s poll taken within 24 hours of Chris Huhne’s guilty please and resignation as an MPs.

The Survation sample size is 504 compared with more than 1,000 in the Ashcroft survey and this means that the margin of error is 4.4%.

It is very challenging for phone pollsters to mount single constituency polls and samples of 500 have become quite common.

Survation, like Ashcroft, found a very high proportion of 2010 Lib Dems sayng don’t know.

In one respect the big news is that Labour are in fourth place with Ukip on 16% in third. That might give some hope to the Tories who could see squeezing the anti-EU party vote as a way of getting ahead.

    If the polling is right in then the Tories could fail by a margin which is only a quarter of the Ukip vote.

That could have very serious consequences.

Mike Smithson

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