It’s now three days since the result of the AV referendum was announced and I am still waiting for someone to claim the prize of £1000 worth of free bets from William Hill. One of the conditions of the competition was that those who thought they had won should claim to be by email. The thread is here. Unless this is claimed by 2200 on Tuesday night the prize will lapse and we’ll use it in another competition. Mike Smithson
What lead does he need to be confident of a majority? The above chart shows the Commons seats projections from Martin Baxter’s Electoral Calculus and Anthony Wells’s UKPR when the Rallings and Thrasher National Equivalent Vote shares from last Thursday’s local elections are fed in. As can be seen from the chart the Tories would drop 20-26 seats and Ed Miliband’s Labour would be 10-15 seats short of a majority even though, on these projections , it has a smaller…
Does 22.6% of the vote give a mandate? The above is a Tweet from Philip Davies – MP for Shipley where, I believe, PB guest editor, David Herdson is/was chairman of the local Conservative Association. The Davies point is a fair one but is he consistent? What was his reaction when his Dad, Peter Davies won the 2009 executive mayor race in Doncaster after coming out second in first round votes on just 22.6%. Doncaster Mayoral Election 2009 Name 1st…
Before we finally move on from the pollsters’ performances in their final surveys ahead of last Thursday’s election we still have to cover Scotland. The chart for the Holyrood constituency section is above. Alas ICM, the top pollster from the Scottish Elections in 2007 and the firm that got the AV referendum correct to within a remarkable 0.1%, did not carry out a Holyrood survey after March 15th and is not included. It should be noted that the Ipsos-MORI survey,…
Thanks to YouGov’s Anthony Wells for flagging this up – the National Equivalent Vote calculated by Professors Rallings and Thrasher. The totals are in line with forecasts the pair made in early April. This based on taken a selection of individual ward results and using a complex formula to produce a nation projection. Note that this includes Scotland and Wales although there were not local elections there on Thursday. For comparison purposes the 2007 split was CON 38: LAB 26:…
Can the party now get serious Labour needs to get serious. Thursday’s results suggest that Labour is competitive again, but it will be hard to kick Cameron out of Downing Street. The Tories are rampant; they have renewed confidence and the No2Av campaign showed they take no prisoners. The weakness of the Lib Dems looks like bad news for Labour. And while Ed Miliband deserves credit for his positioning and for making Labour more voter friendly, the party urgently needs…
Did the PM’s campaigning encourage anti-Tory tactical voting? There were several requests yesterday for me to do something on why the mayoral election result in Bedford borough bucked the national trend. A bit of history: The Tories should have won this in a by-election in 2009 when their failure was put down to an “open primary” which produced a candidate from the Asian communities leading to huge rows and splits in the local party. This time the selection was restricted…
 How does Salmond use the powers at his disposal? There is a new political superhero in the country, standing victorious astride his domain, saltire-emblazoned cape billowing in the wind. Not even Labour at their most dominant, with their historic base in the country, popular Westminster administration and record in delivering devolution could win an outright majority. Considering that only two months ago Labour had double-digit leads in the polls, there’ll be more than a few looking at the Holyrood…