Trying to make sense of the polls

Never before has there been an election campaign in Britain with quite so many polls. The differences in the polls, which are quite considerable at the moment, also make it difficult to get a clear picture of what is going on. To further complicate things, the view from the ground seems slightly different from the sense that one gets from most of the polling. For instance, Tory candidates I talk to in bellwether constituencies tell me that things aren’t as good as they were before Christmas but they still expect to win. I also hear that the Tory target seats operation is still confident of an overall majority and say that judging by the canvas returns and polling they see, the party has only ‘lost’ about ten seats since the beginning of the year.

What there does seem to be almost universal agreement on is that the Tories are outperforming the national swing in the marginals.