Uniform National Swing – the track record 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 two of three. When did UNS break? It can’t simply be one of those myths that it’s fairly accurate – it must have been a useful forecasting tool once. I’m going to show tables for the 1987, 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2005 General Elections,…
CON 36% (33.2) LAB 34% (36.2) LD 18% (22.7) Comparisons are with the 2005 result LAB>CON swing on 2005: 2.5% Second YouGov family poll has it down to 2 points There was another poll from the YouGov family overnight – this time from the firm that trades under the name of BPIX. It’s the first from them this year so I’m following recent PB practice where there’s not been a similar poll for a couple of months and showing comparisons…
CON 40% (37) LAB 31% (30) LD 18% (20) LAB>CON swing on 2005: 6% Has the move to Labour run out of steam? A new ICM poll for the News of the World goes very much against the trend of the past few weeks and has the Tories increasing their lead over Labour to the psychologically key level of 40%. The comparisons are with the last ICM in the Guardian nearly a fortnight ago. There’s little doubt that this will…
British Election Study But could Labour activists now be more motivated? In the next few weeks we’ll be seeing a lot of data about difference aspects of the campaign from the British Election Study – a big academic programme involving a number of universities and quite a lot of polling. In this posting Professor Paul Whiteley writes: “The survey shows that about a quarter of the electorate have been contacted since July 2009, and the chart shows the percentages contacted…
Is there no date because they can’t agree the contents? Last year’s budget was delivered on 22 April, the latest ‘regular’ budget since they reverted to their traditional Spring slot. That date was announced on 12 February. More than three weeks beyond the equivalent date this year, there has been no announcement as to when the budget will be delivered. What’s going on? The timing of the budget is intimately connected to the timing of the General Election: as parliament…
CON 39% (33.2) LAB 31% (36.2) LD 19% (22.7) LAB>CON swing on 2005: 5.7% Yet another pollster enters the fray There’s a new voting intention survey out tonight from the Edinburgh-firm, TNS-BMRB, which has just started doing general election polls for the whole of Britain. The firm is well-established in Scotland and does regular political surveys north of the border. Apparently they had a poll out last week with a four point lead which I missed when I was on…
What do we think of the Anthony Wells explanation? YouGov staffer and operator of UKPollingReport, Anthony Wells, has put up a long post seeking to answer some of the points about the firm’s weightings that have appeared here in recent days. The essence of his article is that there have been adjustments to deal with the new way it is doing the daily poll which do not involve members of its panel being asked to take part in a specific…
CON 29% (21.4) LAB 37% (42.7) LD 12% (18.4) PC 14% (12.6) But the Tories are down on January A new YouGov poll of Welsh Westminster voting intentions points to a 6.6% swing to the Tories since the May 2005 general election and the possibility of eight gains. The comparisons above are from the last general election. But in spite of all this the poll shows a significant weakening of the Tory position there since the last such poll in…