YouGov daily poll (The Sun) Mar 10 Mar 9 CONSERVATIVES 37% 36% LABOUR 32% 32% LIB DEMS 17% 20% LAB to CON swing from 2005 4% 3.5% And the Lib Dems slump after last night’s boost So the Labour share remains stable tonight with the Tories edging up and the Lib Dems taking quite a hit. This will bring some relief to the blue team which yesterday touched a two and half year low with its 36% share. Meanwhile the…
UNS – Exploring the Distortions I’ve put together a short series on UNS – what it is, what’s its track record, and what levels of distortion have occurred in recent elections. This is part three of three. It is an article of faith that the electoral system is inherently biased against the Conservative Party. Certainly a UNS calculation from the position as of the 2005 General Election is very harsh on the prospects of the Tories. But is this built…
Look at how out of line it was in March 1997 One of the phrases you hear time and time again about ICM’s polling is that it is “The Gold Standard”. This came from its performance at the 1997 general election when it was wildly out of line with everybody else and ended up being proved right. Just look at the panel for almost exactly thirteen years ago ahead of the election that brought Tony Blair to power. Those were,…
Come on you guys – follow the media narrative? After doing my posting on the Populus marginals poll early yesterday I thought I’d try to make a quick buck by betting £257 on the “no overall majority” option in the Betfair overall majority market. The price I got, was 1.9/1 and my reading was that this would tighten and then I’d be able to get out at a profit. With so many polls all pointing in one direction and the…
Harris poll for The Metro Mar 9 Feb 22 CONSERVATIVES 37% 39% LABOUR 29% 30% LIB DEMS 18% 22% LAB to CON swing from 2005 5.5% 6% And “others” soar in another online poll As the polling deluge continues there’s another survey out this evening from Harris Interactive for the Metro. The figures are above with the big move, surely, being a huge increase in the numbers saying that they will vote for one of the other parties – mostly…
YouGov daily poll (The Sun) Mar 9 Mar 8 CONSERVATIVES 36% 39% LABOUR 32% 34% LIB DEMS 20% 16% LAB to CON swing from 2005 3.5% 4% But why have the Tories and Labour gone down? Inevitably the daily poll is going to throw up some odd quirks and this evening we see big moves by all the main parties. As far as I can see the reason that the Lib Dems have moved is that Nick Clegg got a…
Evening Standard “….But the kind of scrutiny to which certain punters subject opinion polls now is useful — and greater than that of some political obsessives. When Kellner appeared for a live online discussion on politicalbetting.com last week, he was grilled by dozens of punters probing the finer points of YouGov’s weighting system. It was, compared with much of the vitriol that passes for political debate on the web, a remarkably polite and well-informed discussion. The reason politicalbetting.com has become…
Notice how others are large – like Angus Reid The new kid on the polling block, Opinium, has published its historic polls and it is interesting to track how it compares with everybody else. The striking feature for me is that it consistently has a high share for others – very much in line with the PB/Angus Reid polls. Maybe it’s something about online polling? A disappointment is that it makes no attempt to politically weight its samples. This probably…