The Irish election: Part 1 In the 2007 Irish general election, Fianna Fáil got 41.6% of first-preference votes. If the opinion polls are to be believed, the party’s vote share in the coming election on 25th February is set to collapse to something between 15% and 18%. That is comparable to the infamous collapse of the vote of the Progressive Conservatives in Canada in 1993, which saw that party wiped out from 169 seats in the Canadian Parliament to just…
Lurkers and posters alike make your predictions now With just twelve weeks to go before the May 5th election the bookmakers, William Hills have agreed to provide a competition prize of £1,000 of free bets to the PBer who makes the closest prediction to the AV referendum result. All you have got to do is to record on the thread below what you think the YES percentage will be to within two decimal points. The prize will got to the…
What are the lessons from the first encounter? I’ve just go round to looking at the coverage of this afternoon’s first clash between chancellor George Osborne and his new shadow, Ed Balls – an encounter that has been several years in the making. It was planned to have started in June 2009 but Gordon Brown found himself so weakened by the elections of that month that he had to keep Darling at the treasury. Then it could have been on…
Be careful before entering into private wagers There have been one or two instances recently of site regulars entering into private wagers with other posters on PB threads and then being unable to receive payment once the outcome is known. Can I suggest that you do not enter into such an arrangement unless all the parties are prepared to exchange, obviously off thread, their real names and personal contact details. In one recent case all a poster was able to…
Poll/Publication Date CON % LAB % LD % Populus/Times 06/02/11 36 39 11 Populus/Times 24/10/10 37 38 15 Populus/Times 12/09/10 39 37 14 Populus/Times 23/06/10 39 33 18 A second traditional phone pollsters shows a very different picture We’ve now had the first Populus national voting intention poll since October and the picture it paints is broadly the same as with last week’s Guardian ICM poll. Both Populus and ICM operate in a very similar manner so it’s no surprise…
Which one of the following two options do you think would be best for Britain? (ICM) all 18-24 % 25-34 % 35-44 % 45-54 % 55-64 % 65+ % A coalition of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats 32 21 25 27 30 36 47 Labour governing in its own right 26 24 31 29 28 25 20 Neither 29 37 29 29 33 28 24 Dont’ Know 12 17 16 15 10 11 8 We’ve now got the detail…
Guardian Should Clegg remain invisible for the entire campaign? The Guardian is reporting this morning that Ed Miliband has told the YES campaign that he will not share a platform with Nick Clegg because he believes that the Lib Dem leader is so toxic to Labour supporters that it could affect the outcome. Apparently the Labour leader is happy to share platforms with other prominent Lib Dems – Ashdown/William/Kennedy etc – but not the leader. Given the way that Labour…