After the poll famine – the feast: we hope! With the opening of the offical campaign for a May 5 General Election only weeks away there’s been a dearth of opinion polls. So far in February there have been just three national surveys and we are now three-quarters of the way through, what is admittedly, the shortest month. Compare that with January when we saw a total of ten polls including five extra surveys beyond the five regular ones that…
The betting moves a notch to Labour Overall there has been a slight change in market sentiment towards Labour although not all the betting prices have shifted. If you are making any General Election bets we would be grateful if you could click on the links below. This site costs now costs a lot of money to run and to keep going without being too out of pocket we hope to receive some commission from bookmakers. Currently this goes nowhere…
But is the policy more popular than the party? A Populus poll for the News of the World today has more than 8 in out of 10 people backing Tory plans to screen immigrants for infectious diseases. Some 82% said people coming to Britain should undergo testing for diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis while 68% of those surveyed rejected claims it was a racist policy. There are no party break-down figures in the online version of the story and…
Do voters want this man be able to detain suspects without trial? When you are just weeks away from a General Election everything has to be judged in terms of its impact on the voters – and yesterday’s Downing Street summit on the controversial anti-terror laws and new powers for the Home Secretary is no exception. With both the Tories and the Lib Dems refusing to back measures that would allow the Home Secretary on his own to impose house…
Could this be the scene in Downing Street on May 6th? If the coming election goes according to intenet firm, YouGov, then the result could be a lot closer than many are envisaging. For while the conventional surveys have leads of upto 12% theYouGov numbers have stayed remarkably constant for months with Labour finding it hard to get above 35%. And it only requires a small slippage on that and we are in the danger area where a small movement…
Is MORI right – are we heading for 55%? When we last looked at turnout we suggested that the reason 2001 was so low was because nobody believed that William Hague’s Tories had any chance of defeating Tony Blair and the Election was seen as a foregone conclusion. This time, we argued, that received opinion has it that it will be a foregone conclusion once again – but Labour’s poll leads are nothing like what they were four years ago…
Who’ll win the battle for the Lab-Lib Dem Waverers? Detailed data from two recent polls has provided more information about the segment of the electorate who will shape Tony Blair’s future CV – those who are wavering between his party and the Lib Dems. These are divided into two distinct groups:- Labour supporters who are considering switching to Charles Kennedy’s party because of the war, tuition fees or a host of other possible issues. They represent about 10% of all…
bbc A crumb of comfort for Michael Howard? Most of the assumptions on how many seats each party is likely to get for a given vote share are based on appyling the predicted changes on a national basis and doing a computation in each seat to see what happens there. It’s rough and ready but, in the past, has been a reasonably reliable guide. The best known calculator is the one produced by Martin Baxter. At the last two elections…