When was the first legal political betting market? As part of my research for my book on politics and betting I am trying to find the event on which there was the first legal betting market. Betting became a mass market legal activity in October 1961 when high street betting shops were permitted for the first time. I know that there was very active betting during the 1963 Tory leadership contest after the resignation of Harold Macmillan because that was…
Is this his “most audacious move yet?” In what the Observer is describing this morning is David Cameron’s most “audacious bid yet to capture Labour’s political ground” the Tory leader says his is “the true party of ‘working people’ in Britain.” In his New Year message he says that the Tories will become “the party that represents working people rather than the rich and powerful” and declares that the next twelve months will see “Labour’s dark side” coming to the…
Thankfully for Lembit not many LDs read the Daily Mail There is absolutely no doubt about which Lib Dem is going to account for the most column inches during the 2007. For you cannot go round, as the Mail reported, telling complete strangers that they “have the best breasts in Wales” and expect to survive as party shadow spokesman on the Principality. The tabloids are on to Lembit now and surely the only question is how long will it be…
What will be the size of the “Brown Bounce“? A key question in our Predicting 2007 competition, to be published tomorrow, will be on the effect of a new Labour leader. What will be the increase in the average of Populus/ICM/YouGov surveys of a new person taking over. Here the change in the PBC Polling Average in the first month is what we are seeking. Also what will Labour’s position be by the same measure two months afterwards? Another of…
Wouldn’t it be nice…..If we could get from here….. …to here? Well, perhaps we can…. I just DID!! The second graph was created using only the few datapoints from the first graph, and a clever box-of-tricks called the Kalman Filter. What on earth is a Kalman Filter? Believe it or not, it is a statistical routine that originated in the 1960s in the fields of engineering and signal processing. The Kalman Filter is mathematically proven to be the optimal way…
Putting today’s Communicate Research figures into the Baxter calculator The above is from Martin Baxter’s Electoral Calculus site and shows what happens if you put the party shares from this morning’s Communicate Research poll for the Independent into his Commons seat predictor. For the numbers the pollster reports are, compared with last month’s figures CON 36 (+2): LAB 37 (+1): LD 14 (-3). The fieldwork for the survey took place in the week before Christmas and ended two days before…
Will his 9/11 families strategy rebound? If you look at the betting on who will get the Republican nomination for the 2008 White House race there is only one person in it – the Vietnam veteran and Senator from Arizona, John McCain. His price is now at 1.36/1 and is way ahead of the second favourite, the ex-Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani. Yet if you check the latest polls a different picture emerges – Giuliani has significant leads over…
But why no voting intention figures? The December poll from Communicate Research is out this morning in the Independent but the online edition, at least, does not appear to feature voting intention figures. These were clearly asked because breakdowns of how supporters of different parties answered some of the questions are included in the story. Maybe that detail will come tomorrow. Andrew Grice, the paper’s political editor, puts the focus on the “who would make the best PM” question where…