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This is the forty-fourth in a series of posts that report on the state of the parties as measured by opinion polls. By pooling together all the available polling evidence we can reduce the impact of random variation that each individual survey inevitably produces.

Most of the short term advances and setbacks in party polling fortunes are nothing more than random noise; the underlying trends – in which we are interested and which best assess the parties’ standings – are relatively stable and little influenced by day-to-day events. [1]

Politics has returned with a vengeance after a brief festive cease-fire. All the parties have moved into campaign mode. News schedules are now daily filled with briefings and the wearying trench warfare of spin. What have the voters made of it all?

Our last report tracked polling up to the beginning of December, so the latest estimates from the Polling Observatory cover two months: December and January.

Labour and the Tories

So far, there is little evidence of any decisive impact on the overall balance of power. Labour support has been stable for the past two months – our February 1st estimate of 32.2 per cent is exactly the same as our estimate for December 1st.

There has been a great deal written in the media about an alleged slump in Labour fortunes, but this story seems to be behind the curve. Labour did lose substantial support in the early autumn, but they have been stable since.

Our February 1st estimate for Labour, of 32.2 per cent, is exactly the same as our estimate for December 1st.

Given that much of the autumn fall in Labour support seems to be concentrated in Scotland, where the recent wave of constituency polls by Lord Ashcroft has confirmed a massive swing from Labour to the SNP, it is possible that overall support for Ed Miliband’s party has not declined at all in England and Wales in the past year.

Conservative support has picked up a bit over the past two months, but most of the gain merely recovered the ground lost in November. We now have them at 31.2 per cent, one point behind Labour, and still stuck in the 30 to 32 per cent band where they have been marooned for almost three years. The Tories will hope that their positive economic message, and David Cameron’s sizeable ratings advantage over Ed Miliband, will start to deliver as the election approaches, but as yet we see little sign of this.

Ukip and the Lib Dems

Ukip received less attention over the winter than they enjoyed during their vintage autumn, crowned by two by-election victories. This may explain the slight dip in their poll ratings, down 0.7 points to 15.5 per cent. Both of the main parties will hope that Farage’s insurgents will be squeezed in a more sustained way as election day approaches, but there is no evidence of this yet – 15.5 per cent remains above the highest ratings the party received before 2014.

The Liberal Democrats slid once again over the past two months – down 0.5 per cent to 8.0 per cent, a record low on our revised methodology. The party’s famed constituency organisations will be vital as its national brand shows no sign of recovering.

The Greens

The other big political story of the past two months has been the ‘Green surge’, with support for the self-declared environmentalists soaring, particularly among disaffected younger voters, and pushing the Liberal Democrats into fifth in some polls.

The narrative of a Green “surge” seems to be about selective analysis of the most favourable polls.

This month we have for the first time added estimates for the Greens. Our systematic inspection of the polling evidence does not support the narrative of a “surge” concentrated in the past few months, which seems to be the result of selective analysis of the most favourable polls.

Instead, we find that support for the Greens has been steadily increasing for about a year, and – at 6.3 per cent – is now more than double the level recorded at the beginning of 2014.

As so often in this turbulent election cycle, the true impact of the Greens’ rise is hard to gauge at present – while there is a sustained and genuine shift towards them, it is concentrated among the segment of the electorate (under 25s) that is least likely to vote, and also most likely to be adversely affected by new voter registration rules.

It is becoming ever more important to consider May 2015 at the constituency level.

The Greens’ organisation is also relatively weak, and so there remain doubts about whether the party has the capacity to mobilise and turn out its new support base. Despite the conventional wisdom that the Greens are hurting Labour, it is striking that the rise in Green support over the past few months has much more closely mirrored the (continued) decline in Liberal Democrat support.

With the four party politics of 2014 now giving way to five or six party politics, it is becoming ever more important to consider May 2015 at the constituency level. We have been working hard on developing our constituency level prediction model over the past couple of months, and we will very shortly unveil our seat level forecasts for the election. These will then be updated regularly along here on May2015.

[1] Further details of the method we use to build our estimates of public opinion can be found here.

Polling Observatory is compiled and written by the academics Robert Ford, Will Jennings, Mark Pickup and Christopher Wlezien. To see how the polls have changed since in the past few months, since May 2010, or even since August 1970, explore May2015’s Poll of Polls.