Will this add to Brown’s agony? The panel shows the details of the latest ComRes poll for tomorrow’s Independent and the 22% margin over Labour is the largest that the pollster has ever recorded. According to firm “..the Tories are mobilising their core vote much more successfully than their rivals. Some 96 per cent of people who think of themselves as natural Tories plan to vote for the party, compared with 77 per cent of natural Labour supporters and 82…
Blair Freebairn helping us to understand more the battles ahead “The curse of dimensionality†is a term used by statisticians to describe the exponential increase in complexity as you add variables (aka dimensions) to a problem. So, in the interests of simplicity, political commentators rarely venture beyond one dimension; this is most limiting in the traditional reporting of swing, changes in vote share are reported using a single number. However one of the defining themes of post-war elections has been…
Are we now in the final days of the Brown premiership? In the aftermath of Glasgow East the rumblings have started and the issue that’s going to dominate politics in the immediate future will be Gordon’s survival. Can he hang in there until the next election or will something bring the issue of his leadership to a head? In May I got quite a lot of money on at 6-1 and 5-1 that he would be out during 2008. That…
The PB community wins the battle of the predictors Above are the final predictions from Wednesday’s PB online poll on who we thought would win Glasgow East and the Politics Home panel of 100 “insiders” and “experts”. Notice anything? Without crowing (well only a little bit) this was an overwhelming victory for the site over the PH100 which very much represents received opinion. We can feel proud this morning. Mike Smithson
Was it their “17% Labour margin” that made the SNP prices attractive? Yet again an election has shown the pollsters up and reinforced my default position when assessing all voting intention surveys – “always assume that Labour is being overstated“. The whole atmosphere in the lead up to yesterday’s Glasgow East by election was affected by the Scottish Progressive Opinion survey that had Labour 17% ahead. I was highly sceptical about their methods right from the start and it was…
The polls closed at 10pm but the Glasgow East betting will continue right through until the result is known. I’ve not been convinced either way in the this contest and have refrained from betting today. Maybe that was a mistake. The whole atmosphere has been dominated by the polls – particularly the latest one and this has had a big impact on the betting. Whether what punters are doing is in any way predictive we’ll know before very long. Mike…
How is this going to impact on the fight with McCain? As we wait for the Glasgow polls to close the big international political story has been Obama’s speech in Berlin. You can watch it in full here. American election betting – live prices. Mike Smithson