Were respondees conditioned to put Ming number one? With, thankfully, just a few hours to go before the Lib Dem ballot closes the acting leader, Ming Campbell, is now now firmly back in the favourite slot. All the sentiment today has been in his favour and against Chris Huhne who has been odds-on since the only public YouGov members’ poll three weeks ago put him 4% ahead. Part of the weakening of the Huhne position has been based on the…
Why I’m sticking with YouGov? With a sharp move back to Ming Campbell on the Lib Dem betting markets there’s a lot of focus on the one members’ poll that has been published during the campaign – the survey by YouGov commissioned by a rich Huhne supporter. This showed on first preferences Huhne: 38%: Campbell 34%: Hughes 27%. The run-off figures based on second preferences, eliminating Hughes were Huhne 52%: Campbell 48%. Much has been made of the fact that…
Paul Maggs has devised and will manage the following competition. Simply predict: 1. Who the new leader will be? 2. The percentage of the first preference votes your predicted new leader wins 3. The percentage of the overall votes (after re-distribution of second preferences) your predicted new leader wins You may make your predictions to one decimal place Scoring Your score will be the difference between your prediction and the actual result at both stages of the voting (regardless of…
Why did Ming’s lead on Hughes 2nd preferences drop 19% in three days? At this stage in the Tory leadership contest there’d been seven Tory member polls and the only outstanding issue was whether or not the 39 year-old’s share would top the 66% mark. Contrast that with the Lib Dem race where the only members’ poll in a newspaper was on January 7th – a few hours before Charles Kennedy’s announcement. This showed that Hughes was being beaten by…
But were too many Labour supporters in the sample? In an interesting ICM poll in today’s News of the World Gordon Brown is rated against David Cameron on a whole series of measures including who would make a “good Prime Minister”. In spite of what some of the headlines are saying the question of who would make “best Prime Minister” was not put. This is not a conventional opinion poll; no questions were asked about voting intention; the only options…
Is Ming Campbell at 6/4 the value bet? The seemingly never-ending saga that is the Lib Dem leadership contest takes on another bizarre twist this morning with both the Guardian and Independent reporting on separate surveys of attendees at Thursday’s London hustings meeting. The challenge for anybody trying to predict the outcome is that the two ex-broadsheet papers come out with completely different findings. The Guardian spoke to 422 people who were there and found Huhne had 152 first preferences…
But good news for whoever wins the Lib Dem contest Two new polls this morning paint a very different picture of how the Tories and Labour are doing but both show a Lib Dem recovery. Mori in the Sun has with changes on the pollster’s last survey a month ago CON 35 (-5): LAB 38 (nc): LD 20 (+3). YouGov in the Telegraph has with changes on the pollster’s last survey 12 days ago CON 38 (+1): LAB 36 (-3):…
But leading Tory donors are not happy When David Cameron was first elected Tory leader just two and a half months ago he raised a few eyebrows both within and outside his party when he appeared to make the environment and global warming his first priority. For this has just not been perceived as a Tory issue. It was Margaret Thatcher, after all, who was attributed with the comment in 1986 that “any man who finds himself on a bus…