Could getting this right secure the key to Downing Street? Occasionally we get real gems on the PB threads and there was a great one this afternoon from Blair Freebairn – the geographer who produced that classic guest slot a couple of years ago on the prevalence of English towns amongst the marginals. This was Blair’s latest thinking sparked off by the LAB-CON spat on marriage:- “Labour are totally buggered if they go on anti-marriage. 1 – Of the 100…
Has it now got to be May 6th? I was very much taken by this post from antifrank:- “The Chilcott Inquiry is proving to be bigger than I thought it was going to be. I think Gordon Brown was very ill-advised to ask to be quizzed before the general election; pretty much whatever he says will dominate the news that week, and I cannot conceive how it could ever be good for Labour. That’s another week taken out of any…
Final Polls 1987/92/97/01/05: Polls overstating Labour: 29 Polls getting it right: 1 Polls understating Labour: 1 Have we still got to factor in Labour over-statement? There was a constant reminder from many of the speakers at this week’s conference on general election polling that in only one of the 31 final polls in the five general elections since 1987 has Labour been understated. The exception was ICM in 1997 when even with this it still ended up as top pollster….
Have Harriet and Gord found a weakness in the Tory stance? In the last couple of days senior Labour front-benchers have launched attack on Tory plans to incentivise marriage – an issue over which David Cameron appears to have strong views. The latest Labour rhetoric, as Paul Waugh in his Standard blog reports, is to revive the John Major notion of “back to basics” which appeared to rebound so strongly on his government during its latter days. So are Labour…
Is your seat deemed to be a key battle-ground? One thing that strikes me very strongly about general election constituency betting is that the key information that we need is on the party target lists. How serious are Labour/The Tories/The Lib Dems about fighting to defend/attack a particular seat and which are the battles that they assume are won/lost already? The problem is that this information is highly confidential because the last thing the machines want made public are the…
Daily Mail What will Esther and Chilcott do to Luton South An interesting little side story of the coming general election is what happens in Luton South – one of the seats listed here earlier in the week as being high on the target list for the Tories and one they really need to take in order to get a majority. Looking at the 2005 notionals LAB 42.8: CON 28.1: LD 22.5 this should fall easily to the Cameron juggernaut…
Full datasets to be published within 18 hours The president of the British Polling Council, Professor John Curtice, told a conference of academics, pollsters and journalists today that the rules on the publication by pollsters of the full datasets from surveys are to be changed for the general election. The rule that has existed since the BPC was set up in 2004 was that pollsters had two clear working days to make the dataset available. So if the poll came…
YouGov How will it split as the share for “others” gets smaller? Following Tuesday’s thread on the decline in poll shares for the other parties a key question is who will benefit the most? For working out where these votes will go could be the key element in predicting what is going to happen on the day and whether Labour will be able to stop Cameron’s Tories from forming a majority government. A problem is that there’s so little polling…