What does this mean for the Tories? At the second time of asking, the Irish electorate appear to have given their assent to the Lisbon Treaty. Being parochial for a moment, where does this leave people and parties in the UK? The Conservatives are likely to be most affected, partly because Europe plays bigger in the Tory Party than in the others and partly because the party’s position has a large amount of uncertainty contained within it if the Treaty…
***This thread for Irish Election only*** ***Click here for UK polling thread*** Irish Times Live results thread – how accurate will the Fine Gael exit poll be? Counting began at 9am in the 43 constituencies, with early numbers from the tallymen expected within the first two hours – these have been very accurate in previous Irish general elections and in the Lisbon referendum last June. We should have a very clear idea of how Ireland has voted by lunchtime if…
Out at last – the PoliticsHome Marginals MegaPoll We’ve now got the latest PolticsHome marginals poll which covers 238 constituencies with a sample of 33,610 voters. Apart from the scale what makes this different is that there is a two-stage voting intention question to try to tease out the potential for tactical voting. The 2008 version was based on fieldwork at the end of July of that year when Labour was at it absolute lowest so today’s findings suggest that…
Can Tony live up to his 6/4 favourite status? Several bookmakers have dipped their toes into the water with markets on over who will be the first permanent President of the European Council but so far not many punters have been tempted. What’s the point of locking up your stake in bets on something that might not come about? For whether there’ll be such a role has always been dependent on the Lisbon treaty being ratified by all the EU…
CON 41% (+1) LAB 29% (+3) LD 17%(-3) But stand by for some bigger polling developments tonight Sorry not to have put this up earlier – but I’ve been working on some really big polling news that hopefully I’ll be able to report later. Here is the Friday YouGov tracker based on fieldwork carried out last night and this morning. It shows a Labour recovery and the Tories putting on a point. So the bad news of the Sun’s defection…
SportingIndex Punters seem to be following the tracker Before Gordon Brown’s conference speech began to affect YouGov’s daily tracker ratings the SportingIndex spead market on the number of seats the parties will win at the next election had moved to what I think was a record low of 198 – 203 seats. Immediately after the the first poll to take the speech into account had Labour just seven points behind the market moved back up again a couple of notches….
YouGov Will those Sun shares change as we get to polling day? In the aftermath of the Sun’s switch from Labour there was quite a bit of focus on how influential newspapers were on their readers – but little of it was backed by hard evidence. In the data from the latest YouGov tracker the pollster featured the above set of cross-tabs which I do not recall seeing before – linking newspaper type to voting intention. As can be seen…
So should Boris have gone on Eastenders? Overshadowed, at least in the eyes of political anoraks, by the Labour conference, the Sun’s ditching of Labour, and the daily tracking polls the big political story for many people tonight has been Boris’s cameo appearance on BBC1 Eastenders. It will certainly raise his profile and, no doubt, will reinforce the “good old Boris” rhetoric that we saw in his election last year. But should a political figure do this? I like the…