Given the dramatic changes we are seeing I thought it might be a good moment to look back to the first Saturday in October when Gordon recorded his famous interview with Andrew Marr. It was this, it will be recalled, that was Downing Street’s way of ending the speculation about an early November 2007 general election and followed a week when the Tories had begun to start their recovery in the polls. Gordon looks a bit better in the recording…
Graphics – News of the World Can it get any worse for Gordon? Reproduced above are the graphics that appear in this morning’s News of the World showing the key numbers from its ICM survey of Crewe and Nantwich voter ahead of next Thursday’s crucial by election. Given that a week ago the same pollster was reporting a margin of 4% for the Tories it is very hard to see how any other result than an emphatic victory by Cameron’s…
Is this the first polling move in the post-Ken world? In a number commentaries ahead of the May 1st London mayoral election I questioned whether the telephone pollsters were over-stating Ken’s support because of the way they calculated voting certainty. In fact it was this element that caused me to maintain a big betting position on the Tory even when the phone polling firms had Ken ahead. For it was clear from the turnout history of previous mayoral races that…
Dealing with the ex-Labour supporters who said they “didn’t know” At last! We now have the full data from the ICM Crewe and Nantwich by-election poll and I have reproduced the most interesting feature above – how the original numbers produced a 12% lead with the Tories on 47% and what happened when they went through the “spiral of silence adjuster”. For what has happened here is that ICM has followed its standard practice and has allocated half of the…
crewe.tv Does pre-election polling help squeeze out the third party? The main reason why I have been so confident in my Crewe and Nantwich predictions is the impact that yesterday’s ICM by election poll will have on voting dynamics, particularly in taking the wind out of the Lib Dems’ standard strategy. For with the huge Tory poll surge the only real threat to Cameron was if the Lib Dems could establish themselves as a challenger to Labour thus splitting the…
Mail on Sunday My assessment: the Tories have a 90% chance of winning We’ve now got more information about the Mail on Sunday’s ICM poll on the Crewe and Nantwich by election and it’s clear that the situation is even worse for Labour than was being reported last night. The panel above is reproduced from the paper. For the Tory by election poll margin of 4% would have been 12% but for ICM’s “sprial of silence” adjustment. This is a…
Has the Sun switched from MORI following the Mayoral outcome? A key thing that polling does, apart from to give some idea about the outcome of a future general election, is to help create the environment in which the political process operates. As we have seen so often the pressure on party leaders can be driven by poor polling numbers. For there’s little doubt that shocking polls for Labour, like the one in this morning’s Sun, can affect the whole…
Appalling news for Labour from the pollster that got Boris-Ken right In what is perhaps the most sensational opinion poll for decades the pollster that got the London Mayoral election spot on, YouGov is tonight reporting a 26% lead for the Conservatives. The shares are CON 49%: LAB 23%: LD 17% The last survey from the firm had an 18% Tory lead so this is a very big shift upwards. Clearly Gordon Brown and Labour have had an appalling week…