What happened when Major replaced Maggie The table which I have adapted from the ICM web-site shows what happened to the party ratings in the ICM Guardian polls before and after John Major replaced Margaret Thatcher in November 1990. Polling, of course, was very different in those days and nothing like as accurate as it is today. Major went on to win the 1992 general election with an 8% lead on the national vote – something that none of the…
Should Gordon be thinking of a July election? This month’s monthly Ipsos-Mori survey, published in the Observer this morning, underlines how well Labour is doing following nearly seven weeks of almost uninterrupted positive media coverage. These are the figures compared with the May survey which was published first on Politicalbetting – CON 36% (-1): LAB 39% (+4): LD 15% (-3). Like most of Mori’s major polls the survey was carried out using face to face interviews and took place over…
Are Blair-Brown winning the spin war over the Euro summit? If there is one symbol above all that represents “Britishness” (G. Brown please note) it is, surely, the British sausage. For after that wonderful Yes Minister programme all those years ago it’s a good metaphor for Britain’s relations with the EU. Viewers will no doubt recall the classic episode of the programme when a distracting tactic was drawn up to “save the British sausage” as a mean of boosting the…
Isn’t he winning the battle for Ming’s supporters anyway? The above chart shows how declared Lib Dem supporters in the regular monthly YouGov polls have responded to the pollster’s forced choice question of whether they would prefer a Cameron-led Tory government or a Brown-led Labour one. This is not asking for voting intention; there is no option to choose the Lib Dems or one of the minor parties; but how the Lib Dem supporters split is regarded as a reasonable…
Can Brown be liberal and illiberal at the same time? At the recent British Polling Council conference I got into a debate with a Labour party official about being mis-led by polling findings and that the only thing that mattered was the electoral impact. Thus pursuing a policy that was broadly supported was not necessarily the right thing to do. He quoted the national ID card issue which poll after poll has shown has broad public support and on which…
How’s Gordon going to deal with challenges like these? Whenever it’s suggested that the West Lothian Question or Scottish devolution could become an election issue and a problem for Brown people point to polls that show most voters don’t regard Scottish governmental arrangements as being very important to them. Certainly that’s true of the theoretical constitutional issues but what about the consequence of having different levels of public services north and south of the border? Two stories in this morning’s…
Why I’m continuing to keep my money on Gordon For me the most satisfactory form of general election betting is to buy and sell the number of Commons seats on the spread betting markets. Here the projected seat numbers at the next general election are traded like stocks and shares and you don’t have to wait until the election takes place before you can pocket any winnings. Until now the only Commons spread market that is operating is the above…
Can the Lib Dems undermine Tory ambitions? At the height of the Tory grammar row a week or so ago Francis Elliot in the Times carried a report about some leaked secret Conservative party research that might be a pointer to the next general election. For the research underlined that the party that represents the biggest threat to the Cameron project is not UKIP or another faction on the right but the Liberal Democrats. The survey also showed a disconnect…