What will be the eventual shape of the new parliament in Berlin? Today’s results from the German General Election have completely blown apart what the opinion polls were predicting. The final surveys had the CDU/CSU on 41.5-42% with the SPD on 32.5-33% and the FDP at 7.5-8%. Yet from the results that have been coming in all evening it looks as though the CDU/CSU will finish up on 35.4%; the SPD on 34.2% and the FDP on 10%. So for…
Could her coalition win after all? When we first covered the German General Election just seven weeks ago everything seemed rosy for the former physicist turned politician, Angela Merkel. At the time her CDU/CSU grouping was scoring 44% in the opinion polls and she looked set to be the next Chancellor with a coalition deal with the FDP, then rating at 7%. At the time Schroeder’s SPD was languishing on 26% and everything appeared to be fairly settled. It was…
But will we learn to love the internet pollster? Peter Kellner’s sometimes controversial internet polling organisation, YouGov, which was floated on the financial markets in May, has launched a series of measures designed, it appears, to get people to think of it more favourably. These include:- Hiring the leading political blogger, Anthony Wells, to be its web editor Taking over shortly Anthony’s excellent UK Polling Report site which established itself as a vital resource during the UK General election for…
Politicalbetting to complain to British Polling Council Politicalbetting is making a formal complaint to the British Polling Council over the failure of ICM to make data available in line with its obligations under the Council’s “Statement of Disclosure”. The complaints relates to the Guardian’s July poll which was published nearly four weeks ago and for which the full data has yet to be published even though we requested it in writing and indeed initially raised the non-disclosure here on the…
Will imposing fines on non-voters ensure that Labour stays in power? To Labour officials the party’s supporters must be exasperating. For there’s a big gap between the number who say they support the party and those that actually vote. If some means of boosting turnout can be found, they believe, then Labour’s grip on power could be even stronger than it is at the moment. Labour’s Plan A was to make voting easier. Making postal voting available to everybody seemed…
But why are the pollsters being less transparent? In what we think is Martin Baxter’s first prediction for the next General Election a big increase in Labour seats is projected from the calculation which involves applying the average swing in the latest polls to what happened on May 5th and applying them on a uniform national basis in each seat. The Baxter calculator is one of the great tools for those who try to forecast and bet on elections but…
Have people really forgotten how they voted already In their latest poll ICM had Labour with a 7% lead compared with the 3% that real voters gave the party in the election seven weeks earlier. Fine you might conclude – the ructions over the leadership are clearly causing problems. However from the detailed data from the survey, now out, it’s possible to draw a different conclusion. More people said they would vote Tory now than told the interviewers that they…
What was behind the party’s late recovery? It’s worth looking back at the dynamic of what happened on May 5th so that we are better able to call future elections and one element that has not really been discussed was the recovery of UKIP within the final week or so. For just seven weeks before election day the pollster that was to prove to be the most accurate, NOP, produced a survey showing that just one single person in a…