Sky News ..Or does Norwich suggest that the decline is terminal? By the standards of C&N the result was a big disappointment to the Tories who failed to get the sort of vote uplift that we saw in the Cheshire by election last year. But in many ways it did not matter because the election underlined the big trend in British politics at the moment – the terrible collapse of the Labour vote. For UKIP and other parties can syphon…
And what do you think? Still as I write the result has not been announced but according to my car radio it is imminent – but they’ve been saying that for more than half an hour. At the moment I’m driving from Bedford to see my daughter’s family in Croydon and will give a considered response later in a new thread. Watch this space. Mike Smithson
Does this mean that the better organised do better? The first hard news from Norwich is that turnout was at just 45% which compares with 61% at the general election. This is lower than many were predicting and it might be recalled that at Crewe & Nantwich last year the figure was only two points short of the general election level. The general theory of low turnouts is that the campaigns which benefit most are those that are best organised….
Could Labour have really been squeezed into third place? This was the bar-chart that the Lib Dems were using in Norwich North – all designed to make voters think that they were the challengers to the Tories even though the numbers are from the nation local election count on June 4th. Lib Dem bar charts are all designed to show that they are the challenger. It’s a simple tactic which has been used many times before and, no doubt, will…
Are Cameron’s guys trying to manage expectations? Well there we have it in the panel above – the PB survey of what people expect will happen in the Norwich North by election where voting closes at 10pm. This is one of those occasions where I think the PB community has got it wrong and I’m expecting a bigger margin than 4,999 votes. Betfair has a market on whether the Tory share will be in excess of 41% or not. I’ve…
(This is a post from Robert Smithson, not Mike Smithson!) Electoral Calculus says a Conservative majority of 26.. Anthony Wells reckons it results in a 12 seat majority.. Hill & Knowlton has it as No Overall Control.. But could it really be 150 Tory majority? Yes. Because traditional election forecasting tools are flawed. Electoral Calculus, and the rest, use Unified National Swing as the bedrock of their analysis. But this has a fundamental defect: it assumes parties pile up votes…
Let’s see if the PB community can get this right What will be the outcome of today’s Norwich North by-election? CON Majority 10,000 votes or more CON Majority 7,500 – 9,999 CON Majority 5,000 – 7,499 CON Majority 2,500 – 4,999 CON Majority 1 – 2,499 Labour victory Liberal Democrat victory Green Party victory UKIP victory None of the above Who will come second? Conservatives Labour Lib Dems Greens UKIP None of the above Are you in Norwich…
Was it BJ4BW that started the rot? With the Norwich by election likely to add to Labour’s woes I thought it might be timely to look back to last December – less than eight months ago – when everything seemed so different for Gordon and his ministers. Just look at the December polls above and see how close they were getting. Labour’s share was solidly in the mid-30s and the picture was the same across all the firms. While the…