This makes rather a mess of our heuristics. Normally saying the Conservatives need to be 40+ is a pretty decent rule of thumb, because its very rare for Labour to drop below the high 20s, so 40+ is what the Tories need to have a lead large enough to win a majority. With a big chunk of support going to “others” and Labour pushed down into the low or mid 20s, suddenly it’s perfectly possible on paper for the Conservatives to get a stonking victory below 40%. In terms of national swing it’s the lead over Labour that counts: Conservatives 42%, Labour 38% has the Conservatives above 40%, but might well leave Labour the largest party. Conservatives 38%, Labour 22% has the Conservatives under 40%, but would translate into a towering landslide victory.

There is also a tendency to talk about what happens when the other vote recedes. The largest chunk of it tends to belong to UKIP, and the broad assumption is that those voters are more likely to move to the Conservatives rather than Labour (though it’s not a given – the assumption that UKIP voters would all otherwise vote Conservative is false). It does depend, anyway, on the assumption that the other vote will go down. It hasn’t so far.

On balance I expect it will, but not yet. The reason is on the graph below.

This shows the level of support for “others” in the polls in the last Parliament. The effect of the European election is obvious - a great big spike in support in mid 2004. Notably, it did not immediately disappear once the European elections had passed, it decayed very slowly, but steadily, over almost a year. Now, the present increase in support for others is, to some extent, almost certainly due to the same reason - the publicity and respectability given to smaller parties by the European elections. With that it mind, I wouldn’t expect it to vanish immediately either, as in 2004, I’d expect it to decline only slowly over several months.

The complicating factor here, of course, is the expenses scandal. Part of that increased support is probably nothing to do with the European election, and is instead down to the expenses scandal. I’d expect that to decay as well to some extent, since the exposes have finished and the news agenda inevitably rumbles onwards, looking for new stories, new issues, new focus. To what extent these people come back, however, is much more of an unknown quantity.

Holyrood Constituency vote: CON 12%(-7), LAB 32%(-4), LDEM 11%(+2), SNP 39%(+7)
Holyrood Regional vote: CON 10%(-3), LAB 29%(-1), LDEM 12%(+2), SNP 39%(-1), Green 5%

Fieldwork was 23rd to 29th June, and changes are all since the last System Three poll.

The topline figures would appear to show a swing back towards Labour - the 11 point lead is still enough for the Conservatives to secure an overall majority, but is the lowest Conservative lead since the end of last month. However, it’s important to note that ComRes have made a substantial change to their methodology this month.

Regular readers will know that ComRes used to use a method of past vote weighting that was quite confusing, and which seemed to result in them weighting to different targets each month. That’s now gone, and they are now weighting recalled past vote to a target made up 75% of the last general election result, and 25% the average of ComRes’s last 12 polls. My expectation is that this should result in some more consistent, less volatile figures.

ComRes’s new past vote weighting should on paper be almost identical to ICM’s method. Note that this doesn’t mean ComRes’s methodology is entirely comparable to ICM’s - there are still important differences. ComRes use a “squeeze question” to coax intentions out of people who don’t give a voting intention, ICM don’t. Secondly, ICM then rellocate 50% of don’t knows to the party they voted for in 2005. ComRes reallocate don’t knows to the party they identify with (and, as far as I can tell, they re-allocate all of them).

Other questions in the poll included which party people trusted more to “decide where spending cuts should be made” - 31% said the Conservatives, 21% Labour and 14% the Lib Dems, so pretty much in line with voting intention.

UPDATE: Full tables are here.

This is the equivalent of an 8 percent swing to the Conservatives, pretty much in line with national polling at the moment, though beneath those figures the actual shift has almost all been from the Labour party over to the Greens. The sample size was only 500 (and once don’t knows, unlikely to votes and so on were taken out, the voting figures were based on only 294), so there’s a hefty margin of error, but the Conservatives start the race slightly ahead.

This is of course an early poll - the by-election campaigning has barely started and Labour haven’t even named their candidate. 18% of the people ICM contacted weren’t even aware there was a forthcoming by-election, and 24% said they didn’t know how they would vote (as usual ICM re-allocate a proportion of these people based on how they voted at the last election, without this adjustment the figures would have been CON 35%, LAB 28%).

The Telegraph’s report is here, but only contains a few more findings. David Cameron leads Gordon Brown as best PM by 35% to 18%, the poll also asked whether people would prefer tax rises or lower public spending - 31% said less spending, 12% higher taxes and 48% a mixture of the two.

The graph above shows four regular monthly trackers of economic optimism. GfK NOP and Ipsos MORI both ask people each month if they think the economy will get better or worse over the next 12 months - these are the net figures of those thinking better minus those thinking worse. TNS ask a similar question for the Nationwide, but asking about the next 6 months. YouGov in the Telegraph polls ask about how people think their own household will fare over the next 12 months.

Since we last looked at the graph in April, you can see the nacent turnaround in economic optimism then has grown into a full scale recovery now. MORI is so far the only company to show net economic optimism in positive territory, but everyone shows the public becoming more and more optimistic about what lays in store for the economy. Note that this doesn’t mean people are optimistic about the economy now - other questions show people still think it’s in a pretty dire state - but they do think things will improve in the next twelve months.

What does this mean politically? It’s harder to say than people think. The naive response is to assume the economy getting better means the government recover support - after all, the economy going down the pan damaged their support, didn’t it? In a fair world it would, and I suspect to some extent it does, since optimism is likely to make people feel warmer towards the fear in charge than despair. However, the Major government notably failed to make any political recovery to match the economic recover at the tail end of the last Conservative government, and a good argument can be made that people thinking the recession is ending will make them less risk adverse and more willing to risk a change of government.

Speculation aside, let’s look at the figures. Here, once again, we have the average of the economic confidence figures, and Labour’s average lead in the polls each month.

Still some relationship there at the early stages - Labour went down at about the same time, recovered a bit at about the same time and so on. The relationship seems to break down entirely though from the start of this year: economic confidence has returned, but doesn’t seem to have done Labour any favours at all. It appears economic troubles dragged the government down, but there’s no sign yet of economic recovery picking them up again.

Perhaps more interestingly, significantly more people (41%) said they thought the economy would get better over the next twelve months, with only 30% saying it would get better - the highest figure MORI have recorded in 12 years. I am conscious that I’ve promised to do an updated post looking more broadly at the latest economic optimism figures and haven’t delivered yet, but these figures certainly suggest that the public think the economy is bottoming out and due to start recovering.

The topline voting intention figures stand at CON 35%, LAB 20%, LDEM 16%. Others register at a rather remarkable 29%, including 10% for UKIP, 6% for Green and 4% for the BNP. We’ve seen inflated figures for minor parties from all the pollsters in the run-up to, and since, the European elections, but this is something else and something I’m rather sceptical of.

Full tables are on Harris’s website here. For those interested in methodology, Harris are on online company with their own panel, like YouGov. Their polls are weighted by age, gender, educational achievement, region and internet usage, but not it would seem by past vote or party ID (in fact, the recalled past vote in the tables looks very odd indeed - in their unweighted sample Harris found more people claiming to have voted Tory in 2005 than Labour, so hopefully the weighting corrected that!). Instead Harris use something they call “propensity score weighting”, a proprietory weighting they say corrects for behavioural and attitudinal biases from different peoples likelihood to be online. Exaclty how it does so, we don’t know.

While Harris did ask how likely people would be to vote, they do not appear to have weighted or filtered by it.

I’ve no news yet on whether there are or aren’t any other polls in the works tonight.