Punters on Betfair exchange pile on CON most seats and LAB slips to a 40% chance pic.twitter.com/cQruKHRokl

— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) February 5, 2015

The fundamentals stay with the red team

After yesterday’s Lord Ashcroft Scottish polling and last night’s YouGov recording a CON lead the money on the general election betting markets has moved to the Tories.

The overall outcome is, of course, still for a hung parliament but CON most seats has now become a firmer favourite on that market. The broad split on the Betfair exchange this morning is CON with a 60% chance of most seats and LAB with a 40% one.

This makes LAB most seats a great bet and I’ve moved money in that direction. The reason is that the basics haven’t changed

For the Tories to win most seats they need to pick up a big wallop of LD seats which as earlier Ashcroft polling suggested is going to be a lot tougher than the national figures suggest.

Going through his polling seat by by seat the blues are only clear cut polling favourites in eight seats. Some others were allocated to the blue camp the but polling detail is less promising for the blues. Several seats have more LD voters than CON ones but the former are downgraded by lower certainty to vote levels. In Yellow-Blue spats you have to assume that the most marginal voters will turn out.

The other huge question mark for the Tories is England. On the face of it they need to repeat their English vote lead of 11.4% in order not to lose seats to Labour. None of the pollsters providing England only data has Cameron’s party anywhere near that. ComRes and the latest Ashcroft make that a 4% gap. Ipsos-MORI has them tied in England while ICM gives LAB a 3% lead.

Mike Smithson

For 11 years viewing politics from OUTSIDE the Westminster bubble

For latest polling and political betting news follow @MSmithsonPB