Ipsos-MORI Will party ratings move in line with economic optimism? This is the latest Economic Optimism Index from MORI which, as can be seen, has very much turned round and this month reached just -2%. This is the best since Mr Brown become prime minister and perhaps from the Labour perspective is the best indicator that they might just be in with a shout. The index is taken by subtracting the negative number from the positive one and the results…
UKPollingReport 2008 polls Could we see the same during this election year? Remember the last post-Budget YouGov poll in March 2008? It was so out of line with other surveys at the time that the term “rogue” was used to describe 23 times on the PB thread that night. The immediate conclusion of one of the site’s regular statistician contributors was “.…YouGov has to be treated as a rogue for the moment.. I suspect the true position is still something…
PoliticsHome Mixed news for ministers from the online survey The first post-budget poll is out from the non-BPC registered PoliticsHome which carried out an online survey starting yesterday afternoon. We know that voting intention questions were asked because PH breaks down its responses into party groupings but no numbers are being issued. The closest we get is a statement that “..PoliticsHome is able to predict that the Tories will enjoy a significant bounce overall, and will likely be returned to…
Will this be moved by the weekend polls? We last covered PB’s “The Money Says Index” on Monday when it had reached what was a record high for the Tories. This is a projection of the general election outcome based on what is going on in the commons seats betting markets – the spreads from Sporting Index and ExtraBet (formerly IG) and the new Betfair Line commons seat line market. One of the reasons for the shift has been that…
Have Brown/Darling mis-judged the public mood? It’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves how Tony Blair’s NuLab won his famous victory in 1997. The strategy, executed brilliantly, was to persuade large swathes of electors who had never considered the party before in their lives that it was safe to vote Labour. Blair’s task, admittedly, was made much easier by the Tories who were in self-destruct mode, but it was that “making Labour a safe choice” for the middle classes that won the…
Will he regret not consulting first? I have a very cynical view of allowances and payments to elected politicians. When I became a county councillor twenty years ago we got a minimal basic amount but for every half day meeting we attended there was a £9.50 to be pocketed which was doubled plus a meal allowance if it went on after lunch. The result was that there was an incentive for meetings to to be prolonged. This was, of course,…
Does the union have too much influence over the party? Somebody calling themselves “TrueLabour” posted this on LabourHome yesterday:- “If the Conservative party had a single donor called UnitePLC that provided 40% of its donations, provided the CEO of the Conservative party, had its Head of PR setup websites for the Conservatives, hired people like Derek McPoison to run smear campaigns, unfairly influenced the process whereby many of its UnitePLC employees become Conservative MPs through donations and Uniteplc block votes…
CON 40 (-3) LAB 30 (+4) LD 19 (-2) Brown’s party is back in the 30s After the two terrible polls at the weekend Labour strategists must have been fearing the worst from the Guardian’s ICM survey – the longest polling series in the UK. Well those projecting a big collapse got it wrong. The poll points to a Tory lead of just 10 points which is barely enough to produce an overall majority. This is seriously good news for…