Thank you Gord for such a great market This is not something I’ve done before but I was challenged here last week about my betting and I thought I would reproduce part of my trading details on the “Gordon weeks” betting market. What you are doing here is “buying and selling” the number of weeks that Gord’s premiership will last before the general election. As I reported here just a week ago I had taken a view that the Labour…
When should we get the first measured reactions? Everybody has their own views of the speech but the people that will matter most in the next day or so are those chosen by the polling organisations to take part in their surveys. How will they react? Will their opinions of the parties be any different from the recent polls? Will Labour still be in a commanding position to launch a successful election campaign? My view is that we will see…
Should he have waited until he’d seen all the post-Blackpool polls? If we are to believe the Guardian this morning everything is now set for an announcement on Tuesday that there will be a general election on November 1st. A whole series of actions and other measures are being set in place to allow the time-table and it’s beginning to look like Europe in August 1914 when the momentum of activity would have made it almost impossible to stop the…
But is Brown waiting for the polls? Who would have thought that the first battle of the 2007 election campaign, if indeed that is what we are seeing, would be about the tax treatment of so called “non-doms” – people who work and live here but are not “domiciled”? The speed and ferocity of the Labour rebuttal machine as it sought to undermine the calculations behind the Tory plan to fund the inheritance tax proposal are a taste of what…
Could such a survey be the decider for Gord? For poll watchers last week’s Channel 4 News from the YouGov panel in the immediate aftermath of Brown’s speech was a great innovation. For it’s always been suggested that the publicity that leaders’ speeches attract do give a big boost in poll ratings but I cannot recall a time when we have been able see this from reaction within little more than 24 hours while the coverage was still dominating the…
Will the election betting markets move the other way? By the standards of the media coverage of the past three months Team Tory must be breathing a sigh of relief after day one of the party conference in Blackpool. As the TV bulletins and this morning’s front pages show the party has been commanding attention and Cameron’s phrase “The Great Conservative fight-back” is being picked up. Also there has been no really bad internal news. If there are dissident voices…
Do people switch during polling interviews? I am grateful to Anthony Wells of UK Polling Report for picking up this oddity in the Ipsos-Mori poll. As can be seen two questions were asked – “How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow?” and a second “And how would you vote if there were a General Election held later this Autumn?” For the former the widely reported headline figures had a 7% Labour lead. For the latter the…
Welcome to our guest – Sir Robert Worcester The big news this morning is the latest poll from Mori – the firm that was set up by Bob Worcester – is showing a Labour lead of 7%. Ipsos-Mori as it is now known has been polling in the UK for longer than anybody else and has by far and away the best web-site. Bob himself is a frequent commentator and has detailed knowledge of UK politics and opinion trends going…