Photo: Getty

Lord Ashcroft has released his latest constituency polls. He has polled ten Tory-Labour marginal seats, as he did last week.

He is now amazingly polling ten seats a week. Data has always been scarce ahead of British elections (unlike in the US). Ashcroft isn’t single-handedly changing that – other pollsters are now also polling Great Britain more regularly (but never Northern Ireland) – but only Ashcroft can afford to poll individual seats; constituency polls cost around £10,000 each, and Ashcroft has spent more than £3 million polling seats over the past year.

Ashcroft is giving poll-watchers and election forecasters like us the data we need to have any confidence in our predictions. And confidence is exactly what today’s results give us. Our forecast as of this morning – Labour 275, Tories 269 – is in-line with what Ashcroft is finding in his seats.

Today’s results give us confidence in our election forecast.

His polls showed the Tories doing better in some seats than our model suggests, particularly Dover, Harlow and Somerset North East, which all seem far less competitive than national polls imply, but they also put Labour ahead in two seats – Finchley & Golders Green and Crewe & Nantwich – where we had the Tories slightly in front.

In five other seats, he put the Tories ahead slightly in two as we expected (Cleethorpes and Dudley South), Labour ahead in one (Milton Keynes South), also as forecast, and found two ties in seats we also see as extremely close (Rossendale & Darwen and Ribble South).

Overall, these polls fit the picture of a tied race, and do not in any way chime with the idea the Tories are now on 39 per cent, as ICM suggested yesterday in their monthly poll for the Guardian.

If the Tories were on 39 per cent they would be set to win more than 300 MPs, and would be way ahead in all ten of these seats. They won 37 per cent of the GB-wide in 2010. So at 39 per cent they would not be at risk of losing any of these seats, all of which they won by 9-12 points in 2010.

But they are at risk of losing at least half of these ten seats. As we argued yesterday, it seems very likely that yesterday’s ICM poll was one of the one in 20 polls that isn’t within 3-4 per cent of accuracy.

These polls do not in any way chime with the idea the Tories are now on 39 per cent.

The upshot of all this is that Cameron has more to do than Miliband. We think Labour only need 265 MPs to vote the Tories down. They are set to win 270-275. Cameron in turn needs at least 280 MPs, if not 285, if he’s to have any chance of cobbling together a majority. At the moment, forecasts are very slightly in Labour’s favour, but the polls are extremely close and seats could still swing decisively either way on the night.

By the way, even if the Tories were polling 39 per cent, they still wouldn’t be headed for a majority. Their 23-year streak of minority government and opposition shows little sign of ending soon – they either need boundary reform or a leader that can poll more than 40 per cent.

*

There is one other major story in Ashcroft’s numbers. In every single seat he polled, he found Labour are completely outperforming the Tories when in terms to contacting voters.

In eight of the ten seats Labour’s ‘contact rates’ are at least 10 points higher than the Tories’. (Labour were also comfortably outcompeting the Tories in last week’s batch of ten polls.)