How many of these will there be before the day? I love politics in the raw. It’s all a spectator sport when it’s how parties and leaders handle issues and who is gaining the advantage. We dissect it here to the nth degree and I for one relish every minute. So today’s spat between Dave and Gord was entirely predictable. Yesterday the poster featured above started going up and Labour had to respond fast. What’s being attacked, that a charge…
Did Brown want the yellows to be favouring the reds? Just reflecting on last night’s commons vote on the alternative vote system I wonder whether the received opinion is wrong about Brown’s motives. The general presumption is that Labour hopes that Clegg and his party will now look at Labour more favourably in the unlikely event of a hung parliament. But hasn’t the aim been much more short-term than that? For the form of what’s described as “electoral reform” that’s…
Could the reds or blues produce a version for the final week? With all the talk of negative ads today let’s look back five and half years to see how it’s really done. Could we get something similar here? Obviously we have PPBs not paid for TV political advertising but it’s the message that’s central. What about “could you trust this man with……his finger on the nuclear”/saving the world from a banking disaster….etc” with references to secretaries and chairs or…
PoliticsHome Is a referendum promise really going to help them? The above is one of the findings from a PoliticsHome poll on Labour’s plan to legislate for a post general election referendum on the alternative vote system. Although I’m not totally convinced about the wording of the poll questions I think we can draw something from the findings – voters are highly cynical of such a move thirteen years after it first appeared as a Labour manifesto commitment. The damning…
Are all parties underestimating the opposing leaders? James Forsyth had a post on the Spectator CoffeeHouse blog last night setting out a view that’s often expressed on PB threads:- “We just need to ram Gordon Brown down the electorate’s throat’ one Tory staffer said to me today when talking about how the party could get back on the front foot.” The unspoken thought was that the prospect of five more years of Gordon Brown would be enough to send voters…
The map that changed my view of the election I’ve shown this before but it’s worth running again as we try focus on why things might be different in the marginals. For combined with the Andy Cooke analysis and the marginals polling, including last week’s aggregated MORI data, a clearer picture is emerging of the dynamics of the coming election and a better sense of the outcome. The map first appeared here in September 2007 in a guest slot by…
CON 40% (41) LAB 30 % (28) LD 20 %(19) Is Andy Cooke starting to have an influence? The Populus poll for February is just out and provides further data which could be used to support the notion of a hung parliament. But well done the Times in its report on the poll for raising the question of how much the standard projections can be relied upon. Peter Riddell writes after giving the standard projection – “These estimates assume a…
This is the second part of an examination by long-time PBer and statistician, Andy Cooke, into the level of Tory lead that the party will need at the general election in order to ensure a majority. If you have not read Part 1 then read that first before going onto this continuation What lead do the Tories need – Part 2? How to measure the probable unwind? The simplest thing to do would be to set the three effects as…