Could the outbreak close off the possibility of an October election? Six and a half years ago the last outbreak of foot and moth disease caused Tony Blair to move back the general election date as well as the local elections from the first week in May until June. There was even controversy then because the disease was not fully eradicated at the time the poll was called. For months last time the harrowing pictures of livestock being destroyed and…
Is Labour’s margin really as big as it seems? Now here’s a funny thing – in the three Guardian ICM polls for January-March 2007 the firm was reporting leads for Cameron’s party of 6% – 10%. Yet looking at the raw data FEWER people were telling the pollster then that they planned to vote Conservative than in ICM’s three published polls in July. So for the 2007 Q1 surveys the average number of people saying they would vote Tory was…
Is this good news for the Lib Dems? In the next day or so Populus will be publishing the full detail of its latest Times poll and will be following ICM and now Communicate Research in showing how respondents answered based on what they told the interviewer they did at the 2005 general election. This is great news – for as anybody who has done anything more than the most basic campaigning knows the most important electors are those that…
And bleak news for the Lib Dems from Populus and CR There are still lots of smiling Gordons to illustrate our main article this morning but not quite on the same scale as recent polls have suggested. The surveys are from two pollsters who have hardly figured as successive YouGov and ICM polls have reported big leads for Labour in the past three weeks. Populus in the Times has with comparisons on its last poll at the start of the…
Can Gordon risk his poll leads falling off? Whenever the subject of an early election, perhaps as soon as October, is mentioned people dismiss the idea because of Gordon’s character. The man, they argue, is not a risk taker and why should he chance everything on an early poll. Fine. But is waiting the risky strategy? As we’ve seen with Cameron and the Tories the opinion polls can move very fast and the longer an election is delayed the greater…
The money goes on the Brown bounce being sustained Even though today’s ICM poll in the Guardian, reported in the previous thread, shows a one point drop in Labour’s lead the sentiment on the betting markets is moving towards Labour being returned with an overall majority for an unprecedented fourth term. On the Cantor Spreadfair commons seat market this morning prices are CON 252-255.7: LAB 307.2-310.4: LD 48.1-54 seats. So the mid-point in the Labour spread is nearly 309 seats…
How long can we expect the polling bounce to last? The above table, adapted from UK Polling Report, shows what happened to the polls when John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher in November 1990 – the last time a Prime Minister was replaced mid-term. With all the talk of a general election in the air a critical issue will, surely, be the expected length of Gordon’s poll bounce. Clearly new or different faces and a new approach had a very marked…
Polling analysis: How the votes are churning At the end of last year ICM started a new feature in its tables – special sub-sets linking the answers to each question to what those interviewed told the pollster that they did at the last general election. This is usually made available in the detailed data tables that are posted on the pollster’s website a few days after the main findings are published. Communicate Research now includes a similar information and we…