How good are the pollsters with their Scottish surveys? The Channel 4 poll by YouGov was given a lot of prominence yesterday because of its fairly strong indication that this May might see a change of power in Edinburgh. This shows that the outcome of the election in terms of seats could be SNP 45 seats: Labour 42: Conservative 18: Liberal Democrats 14: Green Party 7: Others 3. As the election gets nearer there are going to be a lot…
Do the peer defections have the capability to open up splits? It is perhaps an indication of the complete lack of PR skills of UKIP that news of the defections to the party of the two Tory peers came out on a Tuesday when there was so much other political news about that it got buried. If the party or Lord Pearson of Rannoch, and Lord Willoughby de Broke, had any nouse they would have done it on a Sunday…
Do we make too much of each minute swing? Last week I had an enjoyable session with the YouGov boss and writer, Peter Kellner, when we talked about a new development his company is planning and, of course, the way the polls are going. He made a point that seemed to ring very true – that people’s political allegiances do not change by anything like the magnitudes that are reflected in the polls. Things really are much more stable than…
Thanks to Paul Maggs (Double Carpet) for the latest set of data from entries for the PBC Political Forecaster of 2007 Award. So quite a vote of confidence there for Ming Campbell but there’s a gloomier forecast for his Welsh & Northern Ireland spokesman, Lembit Opik. Mike Smithson
There’s £200 on the the table that says there will be a contest One of the pleasures of running the site is that occasionally I get asked by the media for my views on current political developments. Yesterday Radio 5 Live wanted to know what my forecasts were for 2007. I gave two: that John Cruddas would win Deputy Labour leadership and that Gordon would face at least one challenger in Labour’s leadership election. My rationale for the latter is…
Baxter or Wells – which is best for Commons seat predictions? Firstly it should be recognised that there is no fail-safe way of tapping some numbers into a computer which will then give you a relatively accurate prediction how many MPs the parties would get for those vote shares. The two most widely available online calculators employ very different mathematical approaches and can in certain instances come out with very different seat numbers. There is one from Martin Baxter (left),…
Could Blair announce his resignation to take place six weeks later? There’s been a lot of interest amongst Blair departure date punters about what the “officially ceasing to be Labour Leader” actually means. This is the term that Betfair use in their market rules and punters who watched what how the betting exchange dealt the US mid-term results are naturally nervous. Peter Riddell had some interesting thoughts in the Times on how this would work which to me sound quite…
The above table shows how entrants to the PBC Political Forecaster of the Year responded to the first series of questions on who is going to be in each of the stated posts on Christmas Day 2007. Thanks to Paul Maggs for doing a brilliant job pulling all the PBC Political Forecaster of the Year entries together. This looks great although there seem to be few surprises. I thought that Ming Campbell would do worse than the two-thirds projects though…