The PB Index: CON MAJ 60 (nc) After a night which has seen two very different views on the state of political opinion in the country what better than to look at how punters are reacting. Are they putting their cash behind the YouGov 40-31-16 or the ComRes 41-24-21? That’s a huge variation in the Labour share which it is hard to explain. Today’s PB Index, which is calculated by taking the average of mid-points on the main seat betting…
Which 2005 “notional” result do we believe? A couple of weeks ago it was noted here that there was a big difference in the two most used projections for what the 2005 result in Ed Balls’s new seat at Morley and Outwood would have been on the new boundaries. This afternoon, while researching for piece on Ladbrokes new market on how many cabinet members could lose their seats I’ve found an even more glaring disparity between the UKPollingReport projection and…
Why has there been so little movement on the spreads? It’s been an extraordinary couple of weeks with two polls suggesting that we are in hung parliament territory and, perhaps, a change in the media narrative. What seemed a certain Tory majority in mid-November is looking just a touch different. Above is the PB Index which is calculated by taking the average of mid-points on the main seats markets and then extrapolating that into a General Election outcome. The extraordinary…
Could their rise be disguising the scale of the swing? The big trend from almost all the polls in recent weeks week has been the increase in the share for “others” – UKIP, the Greens, the BNP and SNP/PC in Scotland and Wales. In some surveys they are now more than double the 8.2% that they got between them at the 2005 general election A question for anybody wanting to bet on and/or predict the outcome is whether these historically…
SportingIndex CON 352-357 LAB 208-213 LD 50-53 MORI moves the Labour spread by just one seat The immediate reaction of the spread betting firms to the sensational MORI poll suggesting a hung parliament was to suspend trading while they took stock of the situation. We’ll have to wait until later in the day for the latest extrabet spreads but SportingIndex did produce revised figures yesterday afternoon and put Labour up by just one seat. Before the poll came out Brown’s…
Is this what ultimately will be the clincher? As we get closer to elections, it seems, there is one hardy topic that always emerges – that of the impact of negative campaigning and we saw in 1997, 2001 and 2005 how much of the Labour message was primarily about demonising the Tories. But what about negative voting? Do negative messages chime with what some of the electorate wants and what’s the impact? So does it matter in the current context…
SportingIndex Punters seem to be following the tracker Before Gordon Brown’s conference speech began to affect YouGov’s daily tracker ratings the SportingIndex spead market on the number of seats the parties will win at the next election had moved to what I think was a record low of 198 – 203 seats. Immediately after the the first poll to take the speech into account had Labour just seven points behind the market moved back up again a couple of notches….
UKPollingReport Could the party of “fair votes” support the vote losers? One of the hardy annuals of Lib Dem conference week is that people start asking which way Clegg’s party would go in the event of a hung parliament and they held the balance of power. But is this totally irrelevant? For the way the electoral mathematics work means that Labour would only need Lib Dem support for a commons majority if it came behind the Tories in terms of…