YouGov: Con 41 (-3) Lab 31 (+7) Lib Dems 16 (-4) Two big stories from the UK and US tonight. At home, results from the YouGov poll for the Sun have given Labour a seven-point poll bounce in the wake of Brown’s speech to Conference. In the USA, McCain has called for the first debate, scheduled for Friday night in Oxford, Mississippi, to be postponed. He said he is suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to help deal with…
What’s the leadership fallout from Manchester? Gordon Brown – better conference than might have been expected. Speech OK with party activists and might expect a poll boost. Looks like he’ll survive at least until the 2009 local and Euro elections. Good conference. Harriet Harman – will have upset Tory supporters with the personal nature of her attacks on Cameron but went down well with the delegates. She’s still there and she owes her position a contested election of the whole…
Remember what happened here in the run up to the 1979 election? With suggestions going the rounds that that Geoff Hoon might replace Peter Mandelson as Britain’s EU commissioner in Brussels should we be preparing ourselves for a by election in his constituency at Ashfield in Nottinghamshire some time next year? The 2005 result is reproduced above and certainly with current polling and by election performances the Tories would fancy their chances. In fact a failure to win here would…
Has her timing been designed to deliberately damage the PM? Less than fourteen hours after Gordon sat down at the end of his big conference speech in Manchester there’s a report this morning from Sky News that Ruth Kelly, the former Education secretary and now Transport minister, is to quit. Only two days ago we carried a story here about an Independent survey where Kelly was named as only one of four cabinet ministers not prepared to answer the question…
But where are the Labour spread buyers? They might have been cheering in the conference hall in Manchester but the general election betting markets barely moved in response to Brown’s speech yesterday. If the speech was the “game-changer” that Labour hoped it would be then most punters did not notice. As can be seen from the chart above the Labour odds on getting most seats, converted into an implied probability, edged up just one percent in response to the speech…
How can he stop the seepage of support? The big trend in recent days from the White House race has been the move back to Obama in the polls after appears what appears now to have been a temporary blip following the Palin pick and the GOP convention aftermath. In the betting the latest Obama price suggests a 62% implied probability with McCain on 38%. Just over a week ago both contenders were heading towards evens. In the polls Obama…
Do Brown’s survival chances look better? Sorry about the site going down in the middle of the speech. We’ve been overwhelmed by traffic with so many wanting to follow the discussion. I found interesting the way he name-checked almost every single cabinet member – that’s a Brown innovation. He very rarely recognises that there is anybody else within his government. Overall I felt there was a surprising lack of passion. I was expecting much more than that. There was also…
Click on the panel to watch Have even Labour-leaners just given up on Brown? The picture above is the final screen-shot form the three-part Frank Luntz Newsnight focus group in Manchester which was shown last night. It shows how those involved responded when Luntz asked those who had just “given up on Gordon” to raise their hands. I didn’t do a count but it appeared that about four-fifths of the participants indicated their agreement – and that in a nutshell…