I have to agree with Matthew Shaddick of Ladbrokes about moving the counts at the general election to 9am on the Friday. On administrative level it seems like a good idea as it would mean the counters aren’t pulling all nighters but are counting after a good night’s sleep. I postulate that it would make for a better environment for political gamblers to bet after a decent night’s sleep rather than pulling an all nighter. The fact we’d have a…
There used to be such a thing in politics as the pendulum. Rather like its physical counterpart, it appears to have gone out of fashion. In fact, there were two pendulums operating simultaneously, one between general elections and one across them. The intra-election pendulum would traditionally swing away from the government after it was elected, as it created a lot of disruption implementing its reforms and, probably, front-loaded other unpopular decisions it felt it had to take, while it had…
Above is the latest Betdata.io betting chart of Betfair’s next General Election overall majority market and as can be seen another Tory majority is rated as just a 37% chance behind a hung parliament. Part of this maybe because of the way the market is defined. A CON majority for this purpose requires the Tory seat total to be more than 50% of the total number of MPs. That means 326 or above. This for betting purposes ignores the fact…
A reminder of the atrocious legacy Corbyn bequeathed Starmer & Labour Today is Sir Keir Starmer’s first anniversary as Labour leader and I thought it would be worth remembering the position Starmer inherited. Only three Leaders of the Opposition have made over 100 net gains at at next election, Attlee, Blair, and Cameron, so Starmer will be joining stellar company if he achieves it. My own opinion is that Labour probably needs to only make around 40 net gains from…
Putting LAB’s current position into context Thanks to John Rentoul for Tweeting the above poll data from April 3rd 2020. As can be seen the immediate polling reaction to the start of lockdown was to get behind the government and the Prime Minister. You could easily argue that over the past year there has been a CON-LAB swing of nearly 10% but that simply ignores the strange times in which we live. This huge lead tapered off in the following…
Even with a lead of 11.7% Starmer’s party falls short of a majority For some time I’ve been planning a piece on how difficult it is going to be for LAB to win a majority at the next election and overnight I got down to it. I started by using the Electoral Calculus seat predictor to try to get a broad picture of the sort of poll leads that Labour requires if it is to win an overall majority next…
I wrote a thread header a few weeks ago which covered the correlation between opinion poll voting intentions (VI) and general election results. I found that there is a strong relationship between VI and general election results, though the small size of the sample of eleven general elections on which I based the work meant that my conclusion was tentative. Given that we have a large number of council and other polls coming up in May, I thought it was…