Do the SNP justify their odds-on status? A week ago I suggested here that the 7/4 Labour price that was then available was a good value bet and was where my money was going. My reading at the time was that this was a 50-50 chance so odds greater than evens represented value. Well we’ve moved on a week, we’ve had a so-called “Glenrothes poll”, and I’ve had chance to consult the person I most trust to read Scottish politics….
If Obama wins big will UK pollsters have to change? The chart is from Nate Silver’s excellent fivethirtyeight.com and shows the Obama leads from the major national White House polls colour-coded according to whether the firms do or do not include cellphone users in their samples. You guessed it – the ones in yellow did while the one in grey restrict their samples to people who could by standard land-lines. There has long been a debate on both sides of…
Nationals could oust Helen Clark’s Labour in New Zealand With the election in Japan now being postponed, next Saturday’s election in New Zealand might now be one of the last significant elections of the autumn, with Romania and Ukraine still to come. The Nationals have led in the opinion polls since the middle of 2006, although their lead over the Labour government of Helen Clark really took off in the first few months of 2007. In the middle of this…
Has the heart gone out of McCain supporters? One of the perils of being in the political prediction business is that what you write can come back to haunt you and I have made my fair share of wrong calls. But there is one prediction of which I take enormous pride – made here on the site just four months after Bush had been installed for his second term. In support of my argument on May 26th 2005 that people…
Unregistered pollster suggests a Cameron majority of 118 After a few weeks when every poll has had been presented as part of Brown’s great recovery, even if this wasn’t quite supported by the facts, we have a survey that suggests that all might not be well for Team Labour. BPIX in the Mail on Sunday has these shares with comparisons on the previous survey at the start of October – CON 45%(-1): LAB 31%(+1): LD 13%(nc). The commons seat projects…
Is American polling about to experience the 1992 catastrophe? Let’s recap what we know. Every pollster in America has Barack Obama in the lead, and the vast majority of the state polls in key states imply that he should win the Electoral College quite handily. I want to begin with a premise that if John McCain wins, we won’t have seen a measurable 2-point a day shift in the polls – a Republican victory in the race for the White…
Peter the Punters offers his “money-making” guide Two weeks ago we ran a piece on Ladbrokes’ innovative market, the McCain Firewall Finder, which challenged punters to find the highest State in the list below that John McCain would win in next Tuesday’s election. This generated some lively discussion and apparently quite a few bets, according to PB regular Matthew Shaddick [Shadsy] who devised and is running the market on behalf of the Magic Sign. In view of this interest and…
Venerating past vote recall Many a navel has been gazed into, and many a hand wrung, about the impact of past vote recall on political polls. The common practice is of course for voting intention polls to be weighted by a formula that includes past vote recall to ensure that the sample is politically representative. For voting intention polls this is entirely justified. However, some people incorrectly believe that without being weighted by past vote recall, readers of other types…