Should Sarky backers worry about polling creep? Taking the polls as a whole it’s clear that there has been a slight erosion in Nicholas Sarkozy’s lead since his triumph in the first round of voting last Sunday. This has been reflected in the betting in the UK. In the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s voting Ségolène Royal moved out to about 3.7/1. That’s been edging back gently and is now at 3.1/1. If the daily poll from Ipsos – the pollster…
It’s a two thread morning on PBC With such a lot of developments affecting political betting markets going on both in the UK and across the Channel there are two threads this morning. Gordon Brown is on the previous one. The above table, adapted from Wikipedia, shows the results of four telephone surveys that were taken last night after the first round results were known. Interestingly the two pollsters that most under-estimated Royal ahead of yesterday’s election are showing the…
New poll shows the leading candidates are neck and neck Two and a half months ago, just as my book The Political Punter – How to make money betting on politics was being finalised, my publishers suggested that I should add a betting guide to the French Presidential election. This put me into a mild panic because the publication date had then been fixed for just five days before the first round of voting and I was being asked to…
Does the Le Pen support explain the gap between the firms? The above table has been adapted from the excellent list in Wikipedia and shows the range of opinion polling in the final week before the crucial first round of voting tomorrow. The top two tomorrow evening then go into a run off election on May 6th. So we have a polling range from a 6.5% margin for Sarkorzy over Royal to just 1%. Both cannot be right. In 2002…
Can Le Pen eat into the rightist vote? The above story shows what could be the final attack by the far-right Le Pen and on Nicolas Sarkozy as France prepares for the first round of voting on Sunday. For if the FN leader is to do as well as he did last time and get into the final run off he has to take votes from the front-runner who continues to hold up reasonably well in the polls. This is…
How much are the polls understating the far-right leader? With the immigrant background of front runner in the race for the French Presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy, being made into an issue by Jean-Marie Le Pen the polls have been reporting a steady rise in support for the Front National leader. Recent surveys have had him in the region 13% to 17% which is substantially up on where he was at this stage in the 2002 elections. Last time, it will be…
Are Sarkozy backers right to be so confident? With just over two and a half weeks to go before the first round of voting in the French Presidential election betting opinion in the UK seems to be hardening behind the Right’s Nicolas Sarkozy. Almost everyday at the moment French journalists are contacting me about the UK betting interest in the fight and for them I have presented the chart showing changing sentiment in the betting in terms of implied probabilities…
Could they be following 2002 and under-estimating Le Pen? Five years ago France saw one of the biggest polling disasters ever in a western democracy when without exception all the firms surveying opinion ahead of the presidential election failed to pick up the support that the National Front’s Jean-Marie Le Pen was getting. This proved to be central because of the way the French election system works. At the first stage there is no limit on the number of candidates…