Or was the soaring price not a vote swinger after all? Until a few weeks ago when the cost of of a litre of diesel had reached the record high of £1.34 ministers and and a number of commentators were suggesting that this one of the big drivers behind Labour’s polling collapse. The view was that if the soaring world oil prices could come to an end and the price at the pumps started to decline then there would be…
How many will fall to the Tories on election day? I was right – Obama running mate betting was a mugs’ game but one, alas, that I found irresistible. This betting disaster has cost me dear and it’s perhaps time for me to fall back on what so far has proved profitable in the past – the next UK general election where if you can anticipate the way market sentiment will change you can go in, then get out and…
Could Cameron really be heading for a 260 seat majority? One of the things I often write when talking about UK polling is that based on two decades of general elections, every single London mayoral race and every single by election where there has been polling the “golden rule” has applied. This says simply that the most accurate survey when tested against real votes has been the one that has had Labour in the least favourable position. So the seat…
But does the poll ask the wrong question? The Guardian’s ICM poll for August is out and has the following shares compared with the last survey from the pollster earlier in the month – CON 44% (- 1): LAB 29% (nc): LD 19% (+3) So broadly little change except that that the dreadful rating for the Lib Dems from ICM that we saw at the start of August has now been reversed and Clegg’s party is back on 19%. The…
Should he really be calling fellow leaders a “liar” and a “joke”? With barely nineteen months to go before a general election has to be declared the Tory leader, David Cameron, has moved into dangerous territory, I believe, with some of the language he is using publicly to describe Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg. As the Telegraph reports it this morning “In a series of conversations for a new book by Dylan Jones, the editor of GQ magazine, the Tory…
But Brown gets a poll boost over Miliband The general picture from the monthly YouGov poll for the Sunday Times is one of little change although as ever we have the paper seeking to compare its latest numbers with its last poll rather than the last poll from the firm. The new shares with changes on a week ago are: CON 45% (-1): LAB 25% (-1): LD 18% (+1) – so Labour’s position continues to be dire and if these…
Is it worth following the university “experts” or the punters? Back in November 2006 the body for politics academics in Britain’s universities, the Political Studies Association, commissioned a MORI poll to find our how their members viewed the then political situation and the prospects for the parties. At the time the betting markets had the hung parliament option as the most likely general election outcome and the split in the “most seats” betting was CON 55%-LAB 45%. The latest polls…
Is the idea of swingback just an anti-Tory fantasy? Yesterday on one of the threads I got into an argument with a poster who asserted “…But no-one seriously expects the actual election to mirror the current polls.” Well this flies in the face of what has happened at the last three general elections. I know we have had this debate before but I thought it might be useful to set out the polling at exactly the same point – 20…