If we all thought the same there’d be no political betting! Yesterday’s SELL CALL on Labour at 346 seats in the spread markets has created a good debate and opened up a split between those who think that in spite of their current performance Labour are going to do just fine in the General Election and those who think they’ll have a struggle. Nobody, though, has been bold enough to put the argument that the Tories will end up winners!…
What about a market on which party will win England? Given the fact that the overall General Election markets are almost a foregone conclusion why not a market on which party will have most of England’s 529 MPs after the General Election? A crumb of comfort for Michael Howard is that the Lib Dems’ ability to take votes and seats off Labour puts this goal within sight. If the Lib Dems just do as well in the General Election as…
What happens if they never come back? All the General Election betting markets have been reacting to the by-elections and the Butler report on the assumption that voters will automatically return to Labour. The spread-betting market, extraordinarily, thinks that all this means that Labour is going to get more Commons seats. But what happens if those who stopped supporting the party because of the war just never come back? The conventional theory is that they’ll return to stop the Tories….
UPDATE NOON Ignore the post by-elections odds changes on Blair and Labour After Labour losing its parliamentary seat in Leicester South to the Liberal Democrats but holding Birmingham Hodge Hill with a majority in hundreds rather than thousands smart punters should stick with Tony Blair even though the response of the markets has been against him and Labour. The William Hill price on Blair going before the General Election is down to 5/4 and Labour’s odds have lengthened. We disagree…
Creating a tool for General Election betting One of the great challenges with General Election betting is the opinion poll bias to Labour. At the last three General Elections this has been an average 6.5%. At the Euro Election in June even the internet pollster, YouGov overstated Labour and understated the Tories. To help with this we are proposing what we are calling the Politicalbetting Polls Variance Calculation which weights and averages poll results according to their proven record in…
It’s an indication of how far John Kerry has come that betting prices on the Democrats taking the White House have more than halved, and those on the Republicans have more than doubled, since the start of the year when the long process of selecting a nominee began. Following yesterday’s announcement about John Edwards being the running mate there’s been a further hardening of the John Kerry odds which are very close to evens on both sides of the Atlantic….
Why the scales are so tilted in Labour’s favour? In spite of the aftermath of the Iraq War, a sharp decline in personal popularity for Tony Blair, and poll ratings for Labour that are 10-15% below where they were at this stage before the last General Election, we continue to CALL LABOUR for the General Election. At the heart of this is the UK’s electoral geography and this is going to play a huge part as we approach polling day…
But the bookies undercut Betfair in the big political markets Let’s hope that more than a few Politicalbetting.com users were able to take advantage of the Bet365 UK General Election seat price market yesterday which one reader described as “absurd”. As we pointed out in the Monday Call, the prices were completely out of alignment with what other bookmakers and the betting exchanges were doing and, indeed with what they themselves were offering in the main General Election market. The…