SkyNews Could this be a dangerous day for Mr. Brown? Getting on for seven years after he took that momentous decision Tony Blair will be quizzed in public for six hours today about what has become the defining policy of his administration – the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. We’ve had a taster already, from Alastair Campbell earlier in the month, of the approach the ex-PM is likely to take and we’ll be exposed again to that hugely capable…
How gamblers are seeing the election There’s hardly been any movement for months on the PB Index – the site’s attempt to extrapolate a general election result from how political gamblers are risking their cash on the party seat markets. Here it’s all about the balance of money with some punters wanting to sell and others wanting to buy. The PB Index is worked out by taking the mid-point spreads on the Betfair party line market and the spread betting…
What’ll the daily tracker do to the election frenzy? There has been nothing official from the firm but I’m hearing a lot of murmurings to the effect that the online pollster will be starting an election daily tracker – possibly next month. Apparently this will operate on weekdays only at first stepping up to seven polls a week as we get closer to the big day. The firm experimented with a tracker during the conference season in late September and…
Is it only the Blue Team that can defy the pollsters? As we ponder whether there are historical precedents for a party to defy the polling and go on to win an election it’s hard to find examples in the Red side. For the shocks that most stand out to me were 1970 – the first I covered as a professional journalist – and 1992 when I was a candidate. In the former Heath’s Tories came to power against most…
Will this help you with the new betting market? This morning, after the slight kerfuffle over what had been said at the polling conference in London, I decided to contact the heads of all the seven main UK political polling operations to put the question to all of them that had been asked last week – what lead, if any, do you think the Conservative will have, in terms of a percentage of the GB vote, at the coming general…
York Outer – 0.44% (Lab 27%) Romsey & Southampton N: 0.46% (Lab 10.9%) Cheltenham: 0.66% (Lab 11.8%) Eastleigh: 1.12% (Lab 21.1%) Westmorland & Lonsdale: 1.7% (Lab 7.8%) Hereford & N Herefordshire: 2.4% (Lab 10.2%) Carshalton & Wallington: 2.93% (Lab 17.3%) Taunton Deane: 3.3% (Lab 12.1%) Chippenham: 4.7% (Lab 16.8%) Leeds NW: 5% (Lab 31.9%) Torbay: 6% (Lab 14.5%) Sutton & Cheam: 6.2% (Lab 11.8%) Camborne & Redruth: 7.1% (Lab 25.6%) Richmond Park: 7.1% (Lab 9.25%%) Cheadle: 7.4% (Lab 9.9%) Portsmouth…
So what did the leading pollsters REALLY say? Along with OGH (Mike Smithson) and one or two other PB’ers, I attended the excellent polling conference held at the sumptuous British Academy on Pall Mall last week. Nearly all of the “big hitters†from UK opinion polling were there – names such as John Curtice, Peter Kellner, and Andrew Cooper who should hopefully be familiar to most readers of this site. Subjects included past vote weighting, telephone and internet polls, and…
Is this putting the squeeze on the “others”? Well done to Anthony Wells as UKPollingReport for spotting this but ICM seem to have introduced a significant methodology change in this week’s Guardian poll which looks as though it will reduce the shares it reports for UKIP/BNP/GRN. For the firm has introduced a change that I’ve been pressing for since 2007 – that greater weight be given when assessing likelihood to vote to those respondents who have a record of voting….