What lessons can we learn from last time? At 1.05am EST on November 3rd 2004 the US news channel, CNN, showed the above graphic on the screen illustrating the result of an exit poll in Ohio, the key state that Senator John Kerry had to win if he was to beat George W. Bush for the Presidency. The message was clear. Kerry was ahead in Ohio and the chances were that the state would give him enough votes in the…
Who’s going to win the Glenrothes betting war? There are more betting opportunities on next Thursday’s Glenrothes by election and this one, from PB’s spread-betting sponsor, Sporting Index, allows you to have a punt on which party will end up third. Thus if you bought the Tories at 3 points and they did make it to third then you would win twice your stake unit. If they lost you would lose three times the amount. Sounds complicated? Well the firm…
But are the marginals behaving differently? The Daily Telegraph YouGov poll for October is out this morning and shows almost no change on the last survey from the pollster a fortnight ago and is producing numbers fairly in line with other pollsters. The Tories will be relieved that the paper’s still has them comfortably in the 40s while Labour is only polling three points down on its general election level. There’s little doubt that the last month and a half…
When are they going to clamp-down on pro-Labour samples? One most Fridays when parliament is sitting BBC2’s “Daily Politics” programme announces the results of its latest ComRes poll on matters of current concern. This generally gets picked up by other parts of the media who treat it, quite naturally, like any other ComRes political poll. It’s not and the BBC should say so. For the Daily Politics polls have one fundamental difference compared with the standard ComRes voting intention surveys…
click the panel to watch it in full What do we think of Obama’s $4m “Infomercial”? The major event in the White House race overnight was the half hour commercial that the Obama campaign placed at peak times on almost all the networks and which cost an estimated $4m. When I heard of the plan my initial reaction was to think that it was a mistake – a bit like his mass rally in Berlin. Obama is already under fire…
Three months ago the endlessly irritating PH100 panel of so-called “experts and insiders” on the PoliticsHome PH100 produced their prediction for the Glasgow East by election. They got it wildly wrong while a PB online poll got it precisely right. Now the PH100 is back again in the prediction business and their projection for next week’s Glenrothes by election appears above. The panel clearly are not gamblers and their projection has had zero affect on the by election betting. For…
Remember the most famous front page in political journalism As we contemplate how certain we are about an Obama victory next Tuesday perhaps we ought to remind ourselves of the dangers of jumping the gun. The picture is, of course, the famous one of Harry Truman on the morning in 1948 when he was re-elected president, holding up a copy of that day’s Chicago paper with the headline completely wrong. Truman won an emphatic victory of 303-189 in electoral college…
How much of a certainty is the Democrat? One group of people who the politicians seem to be ignoring are those like me who look to the interest from their savings for part of their monthly income. Having avoided putting my pension lump sum into shares and then kept well away from the Icelandic banks I now have a problem. After tax the net return from my savings is less than 3% and it looks as though this will get…