Should he avoid appearing as though he is enjoying the crisis? After all he has gone through in the past twelve months you can perhaps forgive Brown for feeling a sense of relief that he has now an issue to deal with that apparently plays to his strengths. But is he looking too pleased with himself? He appears to be enjoying the crisis just a little bit too much. Isn’t there a danger that his demeanour might be seen as…
Could the move to Gord be in the heartlands – not in the marginals? Firstly the caveats: As I’ve been saying for weeks polling during the conference season is almost always very odd and we need to wait until the end October surveys at the earliest before we can start drawing conclusions. Secondly looking at sub-samples in polling data can often deceive. But on Saturday the Guardian’s polling writer whose judgement I respect, Julian Glover, produced an analysis on the…
Will ministers be thanked or get the blame? Reproduced above are some of the front pages this morning – different papers all telling the same story. Could October 6th 2008 go down as reference point we will look back to in the years to come – or is there much worse on the way? Who knows? We are in uncharted territory and for those who like forecasting elections and betting on political outcomes some of the certainties appear to be…
Is Jackie Ashley right – is it now “Emergency Labour”? I thought that we could not let this day pass by without recalling that it was exactly a year ago, on October 6th 2007, that Gordon Brown recorded his fateful interview with Andrew Marr calling off a late autumn general election. Everything about the current political situation derives from that point which saw a U-turn in both Brown and David Cameron’s fortunes. For the extraordinary media honeymoon that Brown had…
Does a 16%-20% margin seem like a value bet? The Irish bookmaker PaddyPower has put up a range of markets linked to David Cameron’s big conference speech tomorrow – the most interesting being the one featured in the panel above – what polling lead will the Tories have in the first post-big speech survey? After some consultation with me this will be settled on the basis of the party shares in the first YouGov poll where the fieldwork starts after…
Aren’t Votes are votes whatever the motivation? In the Times today Peter Riddell is arguing that the latest Populus poll suggests that the prospective Conservative vote at the next general election is “soft” because a large proportion say it’s because they are anti-Labour rather than being pro-Tory. The figures show that of the Tory voters in the poll just 56% said they would do so because they are pro-Tory while 44% are just anti-Labour This compares with Labour supporters where…
Why are they always the first to respond? The “quickie” YouGov poll for this morning’s Sun has raised an interesting question from the previous thread from Nick Palmer MP. He wonders “whether YouGov is confident that the subgroup of their panel who reply to surveys within 24 hours are representative? No idea what sort of bias it might introduce, but worth a thought.” I agree and maybe someone from the firm might respond. What I do know is that the…
YouGov: Con 41 (-3) Lab 31 (+7) Lib Dems 16 (-4) Two big stories from the UK and US tonight. At home, results from the YouGov poll for the Sun have given Labour a seven-point poll bounce in the wake of Brown’s speech to Conference. In the USA, McCain has called for the first debate, scheduled for Friday night in Oxford, Mississippi, to be postponed. He said he is suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to help deal with…