Browsed by
Category: Polls

Why are women voters spurning Blair and Bush?

Why are women voters spurning Blair and Bush?

A big gap is opening up on both sides of the Atlantic between men and women over their support for the incumbent political leaders. Both Bush and Blair are supported more by men than women and in recent months this trend has become more pronounced. A BBC report this week quoted Deborah Mattinson, Opinion Leader Research as saying that many older female voters were disillusioned with the political process and the Labour government in particular. “Back in 1997 it was…

Read More Read More

A hung Parliament or Labour majority of 114 – which pollster do YOU believe?

A hung Parliament or Labour majority of 114 – which pollster do YOU believe?

Political gamblers seeking to call the next UK General Election are faced now with totally different pictures from the two opinion poll firms that were most accurate in predicting the 2001 General Election. On the one hand is YouGov that is suggesting a vote split that would lead to a hung Parliament with Labour 23 seats short of an overall majority. On the other there is ICM which is predicting a vote split that will lead to Michael Howard’s Tories…

Read More Read More

Are the Tory polls gains illusory?

Are the Tory polls gains illusory?

Following the posts about how pollsters try to find elusive Tories a reader has suggested that with the leadership of Michael Howard the party is more sure of itself and that supporters are much more likely to admit this to interviewers. Thus it is not that there are more Tories – just more of them ready to say so! If that is the case, and with all the pollsters’ balancing measures that are in place to redress the Tory position,…

Read More Read More

Finding Elusive Tories – the challenge for the pollsters

Finding Elusive Tories – the challenge for the pollsters

In the weeks before the last General Election a remarkable techicial innovation took place with almost no publicity. Several thousand households were telephoned by a computer and whoever answered was asked questions about their voting intention by a computer-generated voice to which they responded by using the phone’s keypad. Within hours the UK’s first ever completely automated opinion poll results were published. The opinion poll establishment, if there is such a thing, was horrified. The BBC ruled that this new…

Read More Read More

Dare you bet against the opinion polls?

Dare you bet against the opinion polls?

One of the most dangerous, risky but potentially most profitable political gambles is to bet against the opinion polls. I’ve done that twice this year – first by laying Howard Dean for the Democratic Nomination and second by betting against Ken Livingston being re-elected as Mayor of London. The Howard Dean call, made publicly on the Betfair Forum, was when Dean was 20% ahead and I got an average price of 1.7. At that stage I felt I could dismiss…

Read More Read More

YouGov – “Tories 5% ahead”

YouGov – “Tories 5% ahead”

The latest YouGov poll, published this morning in the Daily Telegraph, shows almost no change in March and would produce a hung parliament. The following is the split together with a projection from Financialcalculus of the distribution of seats at a General Election assuming a universal swing across the whole of the UK. Con 39 – 271 seats Lab 34 – 300 seats LD 20 – 46 seats Thus Labour would be 23 seats short of a Commons majority. YouGov…

Read More Read More

Can gamblers trust internet polls?

Can gamblers trust internet polls?

A big issue for political gamblers at the next UK General Election will be whether we can trust opinion polls that are carried out online, rather than by the traditional routes of telephone or face-to-face interviews. There’s a huge debate on the issue within the opinion poll community so it won’t just be the party officials who will be biting their finger nails on election night. In 2001 all the traditional pollsters wildly exaggerated the Labour lead and underestimated the…

Read More Read More

“Labour cannot lose!”

“Labour cannot lose!”

However bad things might sometimes appear Labour is going into the next election knowing that it’s almost a foregone conclusion that it will come out as top party. The way the Westminster seats are distributed makes Michael Howard’s task of winning most seats, let alone getting a majority, almost impossible. A top Cambridge and now City mathematician, Martin Baxter, has created his own model of the UK scene together with an incredibly useful table called the “Battlemap” that illustrates very…

Read More Read More