Remember the sea-change suggested by YouGov last year?
Could we see the same during this election year?
Remember the last post-Budget YouGov poll in March 2008? It was so out of line with other surveys at the time that the term “rogue” was used to describe 23 times on the PB thread that night.
The immediate conclusion of one of the site’s regular statistician contributors was “.…YouGov has to be treated as a rogue for the moment.. I suspect the true position is still something like 39:33:18″
Yet within a month all the pollsters were showing the same thing. A sea-change had taken place in opinion that lasted right until the banking crisis in September 2008.
So could YouGov’s first post 2009 budget survey have found a similar shift in opinion? Are Tory leads in the high teens with Labour in the 20s going to be the norm? Are we saying now that there’s no chance at all of Brown saving the election?
The answer is as I always say is that we don’t know. But Labour has been in the 20s in four out of five of the post-Smeargate polls. Although we need more surveys from pollsters doing it in a different way the signs don’t look good for Brown Central. The overnight YouGov figures of C45-L27-LD18 are even worse for Number 10 than last year and, of course, the available time between the poll date and the election is down to barely a year.
Remember – the trip to Washington and being the first EU leader to meet President Obama was supposed to have been be the game-changer for Gordon; then all hopes were placed on the G20 meeting and finally we have had the budget.
I find it hard to see how Labour can come back. Maybe Tony Blair (on whom I have a 250/1 bet to be next Labour leader) is the only answer.
The betting reaction to YouGov has been sharp. On the Sporting Index Spread Markets the Tories have moved up to their highest ever level.
I’m going to stay in my Labour sell position at 228 seats.
