Will playing the victim card galvanise the activists?

Reproduced above is part of a press release issued this morning by Team Ken in what will probably be the last big move of the campaign. It consists of an attack on the planned YouGov poll that will be published tomorrow as well as the more detailed case of the complaint against the pollster that has been made to the Market Research Society.

The objectives appear to be to further smear YouGov, to discredit the latest polling, to further present Ken as the victim of a campaign by the Evening Standard – all this to reinforce the activists to work harder over the next 36 hours

This is about getting his core vote out – something that Ken and Labour have always found to be more challenging than the Tories.

The final messages on the final day of a campaign can have an impact and this one looks quite smart.

The complaint is about politics and not the science of polling. Every single phone poll that’s ever been held during London mayoral campaigns has massively over-estimated Ken’s vote we didn’t hear complaints from his team then. In 2004 even the online pollster YouGov, in its final poll in 2004, over-estimated Ken’s first preference lead.

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Mike Smithson