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Will his latest figures really hurt Ken? One interesting aspect of the London mayoral race that has been raised by Sky’s Adam Boulton is the proportion of adults who have not registered to vote in parts of London. He noted: “I’m told that when official figures are published next week by London Elects, the quango running the election, they will reveal that over two million Londoners have not registered to vote on May 1. That still leaves around five million…

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Is the trend with MORI really quite positive for him? After taking my profits in the mayoral betting last week the odds following last night’s debate have shifted enough for me to start risking some cash again. A price of 4/6, which has been available on Betfair, looks a fair value bet especially after reviewing the detail of the latest polling particularly from MORI. The firm has had three published surveys on the race and produces, effectively, four sets of…

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…or do the voters not really care? As regular visitors to the site will know one of my favourite polling tables each month is the response to the Ipsos-MORI “What would you say is the most important issue facing Britain today? (Spontaneous)” question. There are no prompts and the pollster has been asking it in the same way for more than thirty years. There are two questions – in the first respondents are asked to name THE most important issue…

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This week’s YouGov poll on the London Mayoral race has Boris’s lead before the second preference distribution down from 13% to 6% in a week. The margin is exactly the same for this measure as in yesterday’s MORI survey. The figures are: Boris 45% (-4): Ken 39% (+3):Paddick 12% (+2) Where YouGov and MORI diverge is over what happens to the second preferences. YouGov reports an 8% Boris margin while MORI had this at 2%. This is all in line…

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What will the next YouGov poll show? The betting markets had this one right yesterday. Late on Saturday morning there was a big move back to Boris in the London Mayoral betting and there was speculation here that someone had got wind of some new polling. The Ipsos-MORI firm, which was showing 2% leads for Ken in the previous two of its polls to be published, is now reporting in the Observer that the Tory is 2% ahead amongst those…

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Why the change in Boris and Ken prices? There’s been a sharp move to Boris during the past hour in the London Mayoral race betting. As at 12.25pm he was at 1.51 which he was last at before the Unison-sponsored Ipsos-MORI poll in Wednesday morning. A couple of people have emailed me to say that the Observer is carrying a poll tomorrow and the paper’s normal pollster is Ipsos-MORI. I don’t know the truth of this but have been following…

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Making sense of the different predictions Firstly a declaration of financial interest: As I reported on Wednesday I was underwhelmed by Boris in the Tuesday Newsnight debate and closed almost all my positions on him for the London mayoralty by 9am of that day, pocketed nearly £1000 from my spread bets, booked a holiday, and took out all the stake money I had on him with Betfair. The balance of my trading profits on the latter is split between Boris…

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…. Who do you believe? YouGov, ICM or MORI? Ladbrokes have just added to the range of betting options on the London Mayoral race with markets on the vote shares that both Ken and Boris manage to end up with. Given the very different evidence from the opinion polls you might as well be betting on YouGov vs ICM/MORI. The former is showing the Tory with a 13% lead while the latter have a completely different picture. Remember this is…

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