Some ugly polls for Gingrich this morning. Our forecast has Romney +13 in Florida, 95% chance of winning. nyti.ms/ywKYEp

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) January 29, 2012

Last Sunday he was 8% ahead

With Florida going into its final day of campaigning tomorrow it looks pretty certain that Mitt Romney will chalk up his second victory which should, surely, provide him with a solid platform to go forward.

Nate Silver has produced his latest forecast – 95% chance of a Romney victory. A week ago Nate’s prediction was that it was 75% chance for Newt.

That’s how the betting markets see it. He’s 1/25 to win on Tuesday and about 1/7 to win the nomination.

Mike Smithson @MikeSmithsonOGH

And Miliband moves up from last week’s record low

This week’s leader ratings from YouGov are just out and all three main party leaders see improvements on a week ago.

Camerons “Well/Badly” figures are 46/47 making a net minus 1. Last week it was minus 3. Ed Miliband is on 20/68 which is a net minus 48 compared to 53 last weekend. The improvement is still not enough to be scoring better than Nick Clegg who has had the best week of all following his speech on tax. He has gone from 21/71 last week to 26/64 today. So a net change of plus 12.

Clegg’s tax speech, which was widely covered and pretty well received, raised questions of whether he was pre-empting Osborne’s budget.

Quite what went on within the coalition we don’t know but it’s clear that we are seeing a specific effort on policy differentiation from the yellow team.

The last time that Clegg had better YouGov ratings than today’s was last March just after his party’s Spring Conference when the planned NHS changes were centre stage.

Mike Smithson @MikeSmithsonOGH

…

The big news today, of course, has been that the chairman of RBS, Sir Philip Hampton has given up a £1.4m shares bonus due next month.

This will probably end the row which has caused problems for both government and opposition.

Meanwhile it costs nothing to join tonight’s conversation in the PB NightHawks cafe.

Mike Smithson @MikeSmithsonOGH

Mitt up by around 10 points on the first round of calls for our Florida poll…this one may end up being a snooze

— PublicPolicyPolling (@ppppolls) January 28, 2012

Santorum has the best favorability numbers out of all the candidates in Florida but still not picking up much support

— PublicPolicyPolling (@ppppolls) January 28, 2012

Bc he’s so well liked everywhere I think Santorum would actually be biggest long term threat to Mitt, but Newt would have to get out soon

— PublicPolicyPolling (@ppppolls) January 28, 2012

But Santorum leads on “favourability”

The leading US telephone pollster that uses live interviewers, Public Policy Polling, regularly sends our snippets on how its fieldwork is going, well before the poll is closed and the numbers are released. Above is the latest on its Florida survey which will continue until Monday.

A interesting element is the high favourability numbers coming for Santorum though in this latest state race things don’t look good.

Romney is a very tight tight odds-on favourite to win Florida – currently 1/11 with Betfair.

Mike Smithson @MikeSmithsonOGH