How the battle shaped up It’s quite a shock, looking at the chart showing the implied probabilities of becoming president, that just a year ago the aggregate chance of their success as rated by UK punters was put at a paltry 13%. The final play-off on November 4th 2008, as we were all the pundits were telling us at the time, was going to be between Hilary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. Both McCain and Obama were helped enormously by massive…
Has the heart gone out of McCain supporters? One of the perils of being in the political prediction business is that what you write can come back to haunt you and I have made my fair share of wrong calls. But there is one prediction of which I take enormous pride – made here on the site just four months after Bush had been installed for his second term. In support of my argument on May 26th 2005 that people…
Unregistered pollster suggests a Cameron majority of 118 After a few weeks when every poll has had been presented as part of Brown’s great recovery, even if this wasn’t quite supported by the facts, we have a survey that suggests that all might not be well for Team Labour. BPIX in the Mail on Sunday has these shares with comparisons on the previous survey at the start of October – CON 45%(-1): LAB 31%(+1): LD 13%(nc). The commons seat projects…
Is American polling about to experience the 1992 catastrophe? Let’s recap what we know. Every pollster in America has Barack Obama in the lead, and the vast majority of the state polls in key states imply that he should win the Electoral College quite handily. I want to begin with a premise that if John McCain wins, we won’t have seen a measurable 2-point a day shift in the polls – a Republican victory in the race for the White…
Venerating past vote recall Many a navel has been gazed into, and many a hand wrung, about the impact of past vote recall on political polls. The common practice is of course for voting intention polls to be weighted by a formula that includes past vote recall to ensure that the sample is politically representative. For voting intention polls this is entirely justified. However, some people incorrectly believe that without being weighted by past vote recall, readers of other types…
What lessons can we learn from last time? At 1.05am EST on November 3rd 2004 the US news channel, CNN, showed the above graphic on the screen illustrating the result of an exit poll in Ohio, the key state that Senator John Kerry had to win if he was to beat George W. Bush for the Presidency. The message was clear. Kerry was ahead in Ohio and the chances were that the state would give him enough votes in the…
click the panel to watch it in full What do we think of Obama’s $4m “Infomercial”? The major event in the White House race overnight was the half hour commercial that the Obama campaign placed at peak times on almost all the networks and which cost an estimated $4m. When I heard of the plan my initial reaction was to think that it was a mistake – a bit like his mass rally in Berlin. Obama is already under fire…
How much of a certainty is the Democrat? One group of people who the politicians seem to be ignoring are those like me who look to the interest from their savings for part of their monthly income. Having avoided putting my pension lump sum into shares and then kept well away from the Icelandic banks I now have a problem. After tax the net return from my savings is less than 3% and it looks as though this will get…