A guest slot by Cyclefree It was Socrates who said that the “unexamined life is not worth living”. By the same token, one might also say that the unexamined EU is not worth being a member of. And – despite all the claims and counter-claims, exaggerations, half-truths, figures plucked out of obscure studies or the air and celebrity or heavy weight endorsements – it often feels that all the referendum campaign has amounted to is little more than “a tale…
It’s been a big morning with EURef polling. First we had YouGov online showing a 4% IN lead on a revised methodology. Then then we had the May Ipsos phone poll in the Standard with IN extending its lead to 18%. That’s a huge margin and it is starting to look insurmountable. This means that the three phone polls this week all have REMAIN extending its margin even though the numbers vary from pollster to pollster. The Ipsos lead is…
Alastair Meeks on the messaging challenges this presents for IN and OUT Leave campaigners have been vehemently arguing that we urgently need to leave the EU for many years as a top priority. Such is their vehemence and their prominence, it is easy to forget that this is a minority view. Ipsos-MORI have been tracking what the public considers to be the important issues of the day for decades. Most of the time, the EU languishes at about 10% naming…
Via @Politicalwire How Trump is close the gap with Hillary in national polling average pic.twitter.com/ugjMw0xsJS — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 17, 2016 The polling average in the chart from PoliticalWire tells its own story. This is beginning to look as though next November’s election is set to be very tight. What’s happening with the Republicans is that the party has an election to fight in six months time and it is coming together to get behind the presumptive nominee. If…
Tory poster from GE2015 campaign Hit Hard Hit Fast and Keep Hitting’ (Jeremy Sinclair, Saatchis) Ernest Hemingway believed the best thing he ever wrote was a six word advert “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn”. You can understand why a novelist might be happy with such an effective use of six words. If he’d spent his time in advertising he might have honed his technique further and managed something equally effective but using only three. “Beanz Meanz Heinz”. After several…
Alastair Meeks looks at the options As Leonard Cohen once crooned, everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost. With Labour’s surprisingly good performance in the recent election round, even the faint hope of a challenge to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership this year has evaporated. This will give him the time and space to effect the necessary reforms of the party to ensure that he cannot be ousted by a Parliamentary coup. So the Labour right are…
The great modal divide continues ICM's two referendum polls after excluding DKsPHONE IN 55% OUT 45%ONLINE IN 48% OUT 52% — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 16, 2016 ICM phone poll before DKs excluded IN 47% -1OUT 39% -2DKs 14%+3 — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 16, 2016 Westminster VI ICM phoneCON 36%-2LAB 32% +1LD 7%=UKIP 13%= ICM Westminster onlineCON 34%LAB 32LD 7%UKIP 17% — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) May 16, 2016 Online versus Phone. During formal GE2015 campaign 56% of phone polls…
A few days ago during the inevitable Political Betting dissection of the too-ings and fro-ings of another day in the EU referendum campaign the fact that this race really might be a close one began to sink in. I am a moderate Leaver – the sort who accepts that there are weaknesses in some of the arguments put forward by the Leave campaign, but for various reasons sees that our future and Europe’s might be better apart. I can therefore…