Could Nick Palmer be right about the next round of surveys? In a post last night Nick Palmer – the Labour MP for Broxtowe and the first of any party to contribute to Politicalbetting under his own name – made an extraordinary prediction about the next round of polls. This is what he wrote: “I think we can all agree the media stories this week are mostly helpful to the Tories, so do Tories here expect to be back in…
How dangerous is Brown’s anti-referendum stance for Labour? A new ICM poll in the Daily Mail this morning suggest that nearly a quarter of all Labour voters could desert if the Brown government continues to refuse to hold a referendum on the planned EU constitutional changes. A total of 82% of those questioned said the revised treaty should be ratified by a referendum and not by parliament. Amongst declared Labour supporters 80% backed the referendum idea with 54% of them…
Is there the evidence to make the toughest call in British politics? This is Deborah Mattinson, joint chief executive of Opinion Leader Research, a pollster for the Labour party for the past two decades and the person who will advise Brown on whether to go for an early general election. If Brown does decide to go in October it will be because Mattinson is convinced not only that Labour cannot lose but that Gord will almost certainly top Tony’s 2005…
Could Brown risk an October election based on this data? The full detail from yesterday’s ICM poll for the Sunday Mirror is now on the ICM website and, as I usually do, have clipped the voting intention the above voting intention data categories by what respondents said they did last time. My rationale is that the views of declared actual voters and how their allegiances are churning give a different picture compared with the headline figures – which include the…
Why are the polls failing to move the markets? Before the 2005 general election there was not a single period when Labour had the poll leads it is enjoying today when the Commons seat spread betting markets were showing anything other than that Blair was heading for a substantial majority. Looking over the records an average Labour poll lead of about 6% prompted the markets to show a Labour majority in the 70-100 seat range. Yet today with an average…
Labour’s lead down a point to 5% The August poll by Ipsos-Mori in the Sun shows a slight reduction in the Labour lead compared with July and might just take the heat out of the 2007 general election suggestions. The shares are with changes on last month – CON 33%(-2): LAB 38%(-3): LDM 15%(nc). The striking feature of the numbers is the sharp cut-back in the the proportion saying they would vote for the three main parties – 86% in…
Are there better ways of predicting likelihood to vote? A local party ward organisation that I’m familiar with was one of the first to get its records computerised and can access detailed data on individual electors going back for more than two decades. Not only can you see how they responded to canvassers on each occasion that they were contacted since the late 1980s but there’s also a record of whether they voted or not. For it’s not often appreciated…
Is Labour’s margin really as big as it seems? Now here’s a funny thing – in the three Guardian ICM polls for January-March 2007 the firm was reporting leads for Cameron’s party of 6% – 10%. Yet looking at the raw data FEWER people were telling the pollster then that they planned to vote Conservative than in ICM’s three published polls in July. So for the 2007 Q1 surveys the average number of people saying they would vote Tory was…