UPDATED Can he make the election about “damaging Dave”? Above is the front page of tomorrow’s Indy with Peter Mandelson now adding his weight to the YES campaign. But does the “Dark Lord” have any influence any more? It’s hard to say – but Mandy always seems to make news and this, no doubt, will get lots of coverage in the morning. Mandy said: “Labour supporters need to use their noddle and ask themselves why Cameron is fighting so hard…
On the previous thread Beverley raised an issue that I have been pondering over – is the ballot form itself confusing and does it favour YES? She wrote:” I voted NO to AV yesterday, but I very nearly voted YES instead. I got the ballot paper and read the pre-amble that said (paraphrasing) “this is about whether to retain the FPTP systemâ€. Below was the actual referndum question and the YES and NO boxes. After reading the pre-amble I nearly…
Is this how YES could motivate Labour voters? This is just my bit of fun – but with time running out for the YES I was wondering what I would do if I was running the campaign. Is it possible to reverse the sharp trend to rejecting any change? Isn’t this the moment take a different approach? Given that we know that “Dress-down Dave” is sensitive about his background as a Toff why not remind voters that the privileged classes…
There’s the latest YouGov AV tracker out for the Sun which shows a sharp move to NO compared with the internet firm’s last survey on the subject just three days ago. Then it had a one point NO lead – this evening the gap is 16 points. The margins is exactly the same as we saw in last night telephone poll from ICM for the Guardian. The next big AV poll should be a phone survey from Ipsos-MORI. That’ll be…
Is comfort-zone campaigning going to cost it the referendum? Yesterday’s big referendum events demonstrated again the reason why No is winning the campaign on AV: they are talking to themselves; their opponents are talking to the voters. The Yes leaders appear to have made no effort to gain any traction with voters to the right of centre. At the very minimum, they’ve not succeeded in doing so. Not a single Conservative has been paraded, nor has anyone from the Orange…
Was it a mistake to push for the vote on May 5th? A big debate while the legislation was going through parliament was whether it was right to hold the referendum on the same day as other elections. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their devolved general elections alongside the referendum on May 5th while in England there are local and mayoral elections in many areas but not all. As part of their poll ICM sought to distinguish between the…
Now will blue critics stop sniping at him? If the AV referendum does end up with an outcome close to last night’s ICM’s 58-42 to NO it will be a massive victory for David Cameron and an overwhelming vindication of his strategy of creating the coalition so he could take power last May. Ever since that event on May 11th 2010 the Tory right has been muttering against him and increasingly they’ve tried to dub him “an election loser” with…
But will it favour YES or NO? The Guardian’s polling specialist, Julian Glover, has posted two intriguing tweets on tonight’s ICM poll for his paper which, extraordinarily will be the first non-online survey for two months on the referendum. It’s clear from the Glover Tweets that the ICM poll is going to be news though I can’t even guess which side will be benefiting. The poll will also be the first to incorporate Northern Ireland voters in its sample –…