Are UKIP and the Lisbon driving the Tory poll decline?

Are UKIP and the Lisbon driving the Tory poll decline?

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BBC news – Nov 4th Can Dave win back the Tory doubters? All seventeen polls published between the end of the Tory Party conference and Cameron’s dropping of his pledge to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty had the Conservatives on at least 40%; of the eight published since then, only twice has the Tory share broken into the forties. Two conversations I’ve had in the last week give anecdotal evidence that Cameron’s move has gone down badly in…

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Does dropping out of the 40s safety zone matter?

Does dropping out of the 40s safety zone matter?

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What does it mean for the election outcome? I’m not sure whether there’ll be any new polls in the Sunday papers and it would be really good to see a new ICM survey. For the big trend in the past few few weeks has been the decline of the Tory share into the 30s so that now only ICM is showing a figure above that threshold. Polls tend to move in step changes and that might be what we have…

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Who is betting on the blues in Buckingham?

Who is betting on the blues in Buckingham?

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Is laying the Tories here an almost total certainty? Like one or two other punters, it seems, I have been taking as much as is available on lay bets on the Tories in the Betfair Buckingham market. My reasoning is quite straightforward – this is the seat of John Bercow, the Speaker, who in the traditional way renounced his link with his former party and all others when he got elected to the post in June. At the coming general…

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YouGov: “8 percent LAB>CON swing in northern marginals”

YouGov: “8 percent LAB>CON swing in northern marginals”

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Does this show that marginals are behaving differently? The first information about the YouGov poll of Northern marginals is just coming out. We haven’t seen a report yet of the poll and much detail is missing but an editorial for tomorrow’s paper has been published and contains the crucial headline figures. It notes that the Conservative party: “…. leads Labour by 42 per cent to 36 per cent in northern marginal seats. Indeed, the Tories appear to be doing better…

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UPDATED: Sorry folks – We’ve been subject to an elaborate hoax

UPDATED: Sorry folks – We’ve been subject to an elaborate hoax

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CON ???? LAB ???? LD ???? OTHERS ????? Only detail so far – “Tories 16% ahead” According to the blog of the Independent’s political editor, Andrew Grice, there’s a Comres poll in his paper tomorrow that will have the Tories 16 percent ahead. That compares with the C39-L25-LD17 from the most recent survey from the firm where the fieldwork finished a fortnight ago. (HAT-tip Planetnokia) So it looks as though ComRes is in the same broad area as PB’s exclusive…

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Stand by all you punters on northern seats

Stand by all you punters on northern seats

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Is Labour improving on the PH marginals poll? Thanks to Wibbler on the previous thread for spotting this – which looks intriguing particularly because the last major marginals poll that had a lot of detail from the north, the PoliticsHome one in September, showed a disproportionate move from Labour to the Tories. It had LAB>CON swings of around the 10% mark in the North-West, West Yorkshire and the North-East and suggested that at least 31 seats could change hands. It’s…

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Has Johnson made the wrong decision over Gary?

Has Johnson made the wrong decision over Gary?

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BBC News Could there be an electoral price to pay? If the Radio 5Live phone in that I was listening to this morning is anything to go by then home secretary and former Labour leadership favourite, Alan Johnson, has provoked a mass of anger over his decision to allow the extradition to the US of hacker, Gary McKinnon. He’s the man with Asperger’s syndrome, who is accused of breaking into US military computers in his search for evidence of UFOs….

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05/05/05: When a 2.9 percent Tory deficit became 6.1

05/05/05: When a 2.9 percent Tory deficit became 6.1

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House of Commons research paper Can we expect a big shake-up in the boundary system? The above is part of a table that is featured in a House of Commons research paper and covers just about all the statistics that you’ll ever want about May 5th 2005. For me the striking feature is the contrast between the actual vote shares chalked up by the parties across Britain and the comparison with the final column. The latter is calculated by averaging…

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