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Remember the sea-change suggested by YouGov last year?

24/4/2009 Mike Smithson

UKPollingReport 2008 polls Could we see the same during this election year? Remember the last post-Budget YouGov poll in March 2008? It was so out of line with other surveys at the time that the term “rogue” was used to describe 23 times on the PB thread that night. The immediate conclusion of one of the site’s regular statistician contributors was “.…YouGov has to be treated as a rogue for the moment.. I suspect the true position is still something…

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Labour drops 7 points with YouGov

23/4/2009 Mike Smithson

CON 45(+4) LAB 27(-7) LD 18(+2) How will Brown Central deal with this? The first full voting intention poll since the budget is out and it’s from YouGov for the Telegraph. The numbers show a sharp reverse from the last published YouGov survey which was taken immediately after the G20 meeting and raised hopes at Brown Central because it only had a 7 point deficit. Unlike the paper which is reporting comparisons with its last poll I am following the…

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How valid are “quickie” post-budget polls?

23/4/2009 Mike Smithson

Politicalbetting.com – Thursday evening after the 2008 budget Will the first polls be as wrong as they were a year ago? The above is from the post published here about a Populus poll for the Times on the Thursday evening after Darling’s first budget in March 2008. The small sample survey was broadly supportive yet within only a few days Labour started its dramatic polling decline that went on until the banking bail-out in the autumn. Tonight we have a…

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PoliticsHome predicting 20 point Tory leads

23/4/2009 Mike Smithson

PoliticsHome Mixed news for ministers from the online survey The first post-budget poll is out from the non-BPC registered PoliticsHome which carried out an online survey starting yesterday afternoon. We know that voting intention questions were asked because PH breaks down its responses into party groupings but no numbers are being issued. The closest we get is a statement that “..PoliticsHome is able to predict that the Tories will enjoy a significant bounce overall, and will likely be returned to…

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PB’s “Money Says Index”: CON Maj 58 (-3)

23/4/2009 Mike Smithson

Will this be moved by the weekend polls? We last covered PB’s “The Money Says Index” on Monday when it had reached what was a record high for the Tories. This is a projection of the general election outcome based on what is going on in the commons seats betting markets – the spreads from Sporting Index and ExtraBet (formerly IG) and the new Betfair Line commons seat line market. One of the reasons for the shift has been that…

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Can Labour save the day on core votes alone?

23/4/2009 Mike Smithson

Have Brown/Darling mis-judged the public mood? It’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves how Tony Blair’s NuLab won his famous victory in 1997. The strategy, executed brilliantly, was to persuade large swathes of electors who had never considered the party before in their lives that it was safe to vote Labour. Blair’s task, admittedly, was made much easier by the Tories who were in self-destruct mode, but it was that “making Labour a safe choice” for the middle classes that won the…

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Poll: Just 4% of Labour voters would back Harriet

22/4/2009 Mike Smithson

Polling update The first full post-budget voting intention survey is not likely before Friday at the earliest – and I would expect it to be from YouGov in the Daily Telegraph. ComRes should be due at the weekend and we might also see one other survey. Meanwhile it’s now been confirmed that the Sunday Telegraph’s poll by the ICM group company Marketing Sciences was carried out in precisely the same manner as other ICM voting intention polls. The wording of…

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So what did we think of that?

22/4/2009 Mike Smithson

Will the initial reaction be the one that sticks? One thing we have learned since 1997 is that the reaction on the day of the budgets themselves is usually a lot more positive than how it’s viewed by the weekend. I thought Darling delivered it well and Cameron’s spirited response was effective. Clegg was OK too. But the government needed this to be a game-changer and I’m not sure that it is. The 50% tax rate will certainly put the…

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