Is the William Hill 7/4 on it being Gord a value bet? Thanks to Noisy Summer on the the previous thread for picking this up but William Hill has just launched a new online market on which of the three party leaders – Brown. Clegg or Cameron – will leave their post first. The bookie makes Clegg the 11/10 favourite with Brown at 7/4 and Cameron at 5/2. I think that they have got this wrong and that the Brown…
Have the interest rate cuts been behind the Brown bounce? Starting with the usual caveat about not reading too much into poll subsets there is some quite interesting data from the latest Ipsos-MORI poll linking the tenure of respondents to their voting intention. From what I can see the firm only started providing this information in November so there is almost nothing we can compare current figures with. But what we see in the panel above is an enormous split…
But what happens if optimism begins to wane? One of the great things about Ipsos-MORI is that it has been around for a long time and in many cases has been asking the same questions in the same way for getting on for three decades. One of those questions has been the firm’s “Economic Optimism Index” where polling respondents are asked “Do you think that the general economic condition of the country will improve, stay the same, or get worse…
What do we think of ComRes’s tax and spend findings? The main lead in the Independent this morning is based on the responses to what I believe is a novel form of polling from the latest ComRes survey in which the headline figures showed a Tory 5% lead. For the pollster then went on to ask a series of questions of how respondents would vote in a number of different scenarios and then reported the findings applying the same weighting…
PB Balance of Money Index: CON majority 20 seats With possibly a YouGov and a ComRes survey still outstanding before we can draw the curtain on the 2008 polling season the apparent set-backs for the Tories are leaving spread betting punters relatively unmoved. The above table shows the overnight levels from which the PB Balance of Money Index is worked out – and as can be seen the mid-point spread on the Tories is at 335 seats – or ten…
How will these charts look next year? With the publication of its December political monitor Ipsos-MORI has produced some charts – a couple of which a reproduced above – showing the big trends. What’s helpful here is the way the margin of error is featured graphically. The big question now, of course, is whether there’s more to come for Labour in the “bail-out” trend that started in October or are we going to see a new normality of the Tories…
With five polls showing the same thing should he risk it? The “Golden Rule” has operated in every single general election, EU election, London Mayoral election and in by elections where there has been polling right back to the 1980s – so clearly the wise course for Labour is to look at the worst case scenario. Tory polling figures seem more robust than Labour ones. One of the great things about Decembers is that all the polling activity is normally…
Let’s get real about a 2009 Q1-Q2 election Everywhere, it seems, there is election date speculation and the new possibility that is coming into the frame is February 2009. But how seriously should we take this? For one of the problems we have at the moment is that the only polls that are getting highlighted are the ones at the extreme. So YouGov’s survey for the Sunday Times showing a small increase in the Tory share and a small decrease…