Boris lead up to 11%

According to a YouGov poll for today's Evening Standard.

    * Boris 46% (Up 2)
    * Livingstone 35% (Down 2)
    * Brian Paddick
    * Sian Berry (Green Party)
    * Others 

Boris's lead on second preferences is 10%. Boris is on 55% to Livingstone's 45%. Quick! Off to the bookies. Can't see vote shares for Paddick or Berry, I'm afraid.

Also in the Evening Standard (just 50p from all good newsagents) is news that Brian Cooke, the Chairman of TravelWatch, London's independent travel watchdog, is backing Boris.  "It is time for a change," he says. "

Sometimes one wonders whether the truth and Mr Livingstone sit together at all. Ken has paid lip service to real consultation on a whole raft of issues and I don't believe Boris will have the arrogance of the 'Ken knows best' policy." Cooke backed Livingstone in the previous elections. Also a pretty desperate smear campaign among Muslim voters by Livingstone supporters that Boris would ban the Koran.

Comments

[EML]

Yikes!

Well I hope this poll is nearer the truth than most of the others that show a Ken lead.

By the way, can anyone say how long it will take to declare a winner? Will it be Thursday or Friday - or a bit longer?

[Jennifer Wells]

Wow! One pollster is certainly going to be embarrassed on Friday!!!!

[Richard]

Yougov have a track record of being very reliable although it does seem strange that they've been giving Boris a much bigger boost than other polls. Any possible reason why this might be? (I'm certainly not suggesting they're rigged. They were, after all, showing strong Labour leads in the national polls last summer.)

[Leon]

YouGov polls increasingly look odd in this election. Why are they showing bigger extremes in the numbers?

[Joe Mooney]

I think the polls may be correct. I was out canvassing for Boris in NW6 a few Saturdays ago and the figures were very encouraging for him.

It will of course depend on turnout and I would urge all Conservatives in London not to leave it to others to vote for Boris - they may be leaving it to you. So do come out and vote for Boris on Thursday May 1st.

[Chad Noble]

Definitely a pivotal moment for Stephan Shakespeare and his rivals; either his method or that of his rivals is completely useless.

Not long to wait now.

[CorkHurler]

Following this election with great interest from Dublin. This might be an obscure point but I assume all pollsters are correctly controlling for the fact that the electorate for the mayoral election is different from that for a general election i.e Commonwealth citizens resident in the UK cant vote in a general election but can vote in the mayoral election. Presumably when you register for yougov's panel you have to state whether you are a citizen of the UK (or Ireland as Irish citizens can vote in UK elections and vice versa) or just a resident of the UK. Do yougov have sufficient Commonwealth citizen, UK resident registered voters in their samples? Would commonwealth citizens be more inclined to vote for Ken?

[YMT]

This election is going to be close, very close. However I worry hugely about postal fraud in this one. There is going to be a need for all the votes to checked as genuine as frankly I see it as very likely that some dubious militant left wingers will try all they can to get as much play out the system as they can, Kens lined the pockets of a lot of people they aren't going to want to see him go.

[Christina Speight]

Joe Mooney - Where's NW6 please?

Frankly polling for the London Mayor must be a nightmare. How on earth are you supposed to balance in your sample [nb these are probably the wrong places and groups but I hope readers get the point] the Turks in Finsbury Park versus the Greeks in Holloway road, the Sufi Muslims in Brick Lane against the Jihadists in Tower Hamlets, the Sikhs in Southall versus the Hindus in Neasden and Hounslow. Frankly if I were a pollster I'd issue a health warning for a lot of them are going to get egg on their face! Who ever does will find their standing in the National polls devalued.

[John F Aberdeen]

Great news on a wet Monday. It looks like one or more of the pollsters will have egg on their faces on Friday,, hope its the union sponsored one.
Reference the report from the Rowantree Foundation today regarding electoral fraud, I hope CCHQ is keeping a close eye on both our opponents and, after a tory councillor was found guilty, sadly our own.
Electoral fraud is one more area where Nulab has been guilty of dragging our country down to the level of a corrupt despotic third world country like Zimbabwe.
Anyway good luck to our Boris and all the other conservative councillors in the local government elections and I urge tory voters to get out and vote.
There is no point in you all complaining on this site and others about Bottler and the Scottish mafia running England if, on election day, you don,t vote. Please, this Thursday begin the process of sending Bottler, Darling and that other pathetic Browne "homeward to think again"
I,m a Brit/Scot and I will be cheering on your victories because, although Brown etc are also Scots, they are as much my enemies as they are yours.

[bluepatriot]

A spokeswoman for Mr Livingstone's campaign said: "This is a farcical poll which will do deep damage to the reputation of YouGov when the actual result is announced on 1 May."

Quoted in The Evening Standard.

[DavidRHayes]

Well this is certainly encouraging, though YouGov's methodology is generally criticised, it has beaten many of the traditional ones.

The key thing is the weighting of the poll and the key questions. In my opinion YouGov have overstated a bit, but only by 1-3%.

Who knows though, YouGov could have just as easily understated Boris by 1-3%

[Mr-Spiggot]

This post is going to look rather silly and a bit desperate on Friday.
Why make an issue of one poll, when the others show King Newt ahead?

[comstock]

Blue patriot, indeed. This YouGov poll is a joke.

[BW]

You hope Comstock.

I understood that there are serious questions of credability about the first two polls, so it is hardly surprising that YouGov are showing markedly different figures. Yes on Friday we will know the result of the only poll that counts...

[Bexie]

We shall see what the result is after the postals have been counted.

I have seen at least one count where they go for ZaNuLab against the trend of the rest of the poll. That in iteself is one guide that electoral fraud is underway.

We should make sure that postal votes are only given to people who have a genuine need rather than cant be bothered to get to the polling station. We should also consider voting on Saturday and or Sunday to make it easier for people.

[Islamic-Sun]

This is just silly.
Two of the polls show Ken ahead, why focus on the ONE which puts Boris ahead?

Isn't the much bigger story the loss of Boris's lead in the polls from a month ago?

[bloggingharry]

This poll should not be believed - the same as all of them. The only poll that matters is on Thursday.

Let's get out and vote for the Mayor of London we deserve. VOTE FOR BORIS JOHNSON!

[David (One of many)]

This poll is as encouraging as it is worrying; do we trust this one because it's good for us, or the TU-sponsored ones which are miserable and maybe biased but perhaps more realistic? The most important thing is to get out the vote on Friday!

Should anyone care, The Sun's online poll is interesting, though not what you'd call scientific.

Johnson - 54%
Livingstone - 15%
Paddick - 9%

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/london_mayor/article1099263.ece

If only ;)

[Danzig]

Seems farcical to make a major issue of one poll reading differently to the others.
Why even use the headline, 'Boris lead up to 11%?'
Desperate wishful, thinking stuff I fear.

I imagine Boris is too much of a gentleman to raise concerns over electoral fraud, but I have heard some wards in East London are
very, very suspect.

What a massive blow to the morale of the Tory party if Boris is beaten, as seems very likely now.
This could even be the start of a media driven good news story for the hopeless shower in Government at the moment.
The Tories will need to win at least 200 net gains in tough electoral territory to even get much positive press.
On the contrary Labour will be feted if it only loses 100-150 seats.

[Edison Smith]

Don't trust this poll for one second.

It's much, much tighter than this and down on the ground one gets a real sense there is the usual late swing back to the incumbant.

I still think Ken will sneak it.

[Old Whig]

I never trust You Gov, as they seem to always inflate the Tory vote. Mori do the same for Labour.

I was canvassing all weekend and, based on what I saw, I would say that the wretched Livingstone is comfortably ahead. The area where I was canvassing was usually Conservative, but Boris was not personally popular.

Finally, Livingstone is going to drench the postal vote. Why do you think he has been funding every "minority" group under the sun for the past 8 years? Now is pay-back time and the boyos on the payroll are going to deliver their block votes.

On Friday, when the ballots are counted, I think that we should brace ourselves for a repeat of the Southall By-Election experience. This is Big City London politics in 2008, which far more resembles New York in "The Bonfire of the Vanities" era than quaint parish elections in the Home Counties.

The game has changed in London. The ethnic block vote and the postal ballot currently reign supreme. You can forget "winning on the day", as most of the votes will be in the bag long before then.

[Adam-]

It could be something to do with an inherent bias in the samples. Ipsos-MORI and ICM, I believe, are telephone polls. If they call during the day, they are more likely to catch people in who are unemployed, or trapped in Brown's benefits system, who are statistically more likely to vote Labour.

YouGov poll over the internet. Participants are self-selecting (in as much as they agree to be badgered by YouGov every now and then). They are likely to be regular internet users. Regular internet users are often fairly affulent and may be more likely to vote Tory. The conservative dominance of the opinion channels (i.e. blogs) is likely to skew opinions. These things are naturally very difficult to weight against.

To cut a long story short, the people who make it down to the polling booth are likely very different to the people polled here.

[MrB]

Mike Smithson on PB has pointed out that in the past mayoral elections, the poll that was LEAST kind to Ken, was the MOST accurate.

All the polls overstated Ken at the last two elections. Is there any reason to believe that most these will be any different?

Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if this Yougov one was an overstatement for Boris.

[David]

NW6 is West Hampstead, which tends to be a solid Lib Dem area at local government level, so it bodes well if Boris is doing well there.

[Richard]

When is the ICM poll due?

[eugene]

Why is Paddick missing?....or is it that he scores less now than the minor parties....he deserves it....but alas, I jest.

[David (One of many)]

Anyone see the Sky debate? Boris actually did very well, I thought. Passionate without the bluster he has put across in the last debates.

[ak23566]

Not sure where you were canvassing Old Whig, but I was delivering Boris' GOTV cards in Croydon's Waddon ward over the weekend and I had people banging on their windows to give me the "thumbs up" and one young city-bloke actually ran down the road to ask me if I had a window poster.

If you really think Livingstone is popular in Conservative neighbourhoods then you are either a Labour troll or you were canvassing in Cloud Cuckoo Land!

[comstock]

ICM are not doing another poll, according to political betting......