What is it about polling the third party? Just look at the figures in the panel above showing the Lib Dem shares in the latest surveys from the six firms that carry out regular national voting intention opinion polls. All but Populus are from surveys that have been published in the past week. How can you possibly have a situation with such a range of shares from the six different pollsters? This is important because the broad trend in most…
How can Cameron be stopped if the Tories are in the 40s? In the panel above are the Tory shares from the latest polls by the six firms that carry out monthly voting intention polls in Britain. There seem to be two clusters – ComRes/ICM/YouGov which have the party in the low 40s with Populus/MORI/BPIX recording shares in the mid-40s. These have varied from time to time but in spite of all that’s been happening Labour has found it all…
How good are current ratings as a pointer to the general election? The fact that there’s been absolutely no change in the CON-LAB shares in today’s Guardian ICM brings to mind the success this series of polls has had in the run-ups to the last three general elections – even from this far out. Just look at the table above showing all the ICM polls for the paper from October 2003 to May 2005 – about the same distance we…
What will ICM be saying tonight? As site regulars will know I have theory, based on nearly three years of records, that the single most important driver in the CON-LAB poll numbers is the amount of media coverage that Cameron gets. If he’s been making the headlines or leading the bulletins then his party’s ratings go up – if he’s been blanked out of the news agenda then there will be a decline. This is about the quantity of coverage…
So was that the Labour recovery that was? First of all – hands up – I got it wrong. My reading of the extraordinary events of the past fortnight was that this would give Labour a significant boost and that the crisis was a potential game-changer that could alter our view of the next election. This is how I’ve been betting. We’ve all seen the incredible transformation that has come over Brown – the international acclaim that has given him…
What if Cameron’s no longer seen as Prime Minister-designate? For reasons that I’ve never been able to fathom most of the regular monthly polls that we see in the UK are published in the final part of the month. So this weekend and in the days after that I am expecting at least two ComRes polls, two YouGov polls, one ICM survey and the October political monitor by Ipsos-MORI. There might be others including the non-registered BPIX. One or possibly…
What does this say about his potential at the next general election? Almost everybody with an interest in politics remembers May 1st 1997 – the day that Tony Blair’s Labour party swept to power after eighteen years in the wilderness. The 13% margin in the popular vote and the way anti Tory voters were prepared to vote for whoever in their seat had the best chance of beating the Tory meant that Labour’s landslide majority was substantially greater than any…
Should we believe a word the instant pundits say on the night? The general view of the pundits after the first presidential debate last month was that McCain had probably won. He’d made his arguments better and many of the “experts” were ready to pronounce him the instant winner. That’s not how it played out in the polls and since that first encounter the movement has all been one way – to the young black Senator from Illinois. Almost the…