Will this increase the nervousness amongst MPs in the marginals? The pollster which has been operating in the UK for longer than anybody else has just published their Monitor for July 2008 and it shows a move towards the Conservatives and the biggest lead for the party in decades. These are the figures with comparisons on a month ago CON 47% (+2): LAB 27% (-2): LD 15% (-2). These figures, like all MORI surveys are based on those “certain to…
What have the double digit leads done for expectation management? One of the main tasks for party spinners ahead of any election these days is to down-play your chances on the Thursday. For a failure to achieve an outcome that has been widely expected is much much worse than if everybody thinks that the party was going to go down anyway. Given the precarious position of Labour and Mr. Brown nationally the Glasgow East aftermath is going to be much…
For one week in August, Politicalbetting.com will be reporting from Denver Back in March, I sent in some application forms to the DNC and RNC so that PoliticalBetting.com could be credentialled alongside other media outlets to cover the Nominating Conventions from Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul respectively. The RNC gave us an unequivocal rejection (the Right seems less interested in what Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) called “a Series of Tubes“ than the Left) but the Democrats have made some accommodation for…
Is this why Labour was so far ahead? After my moan this morning about Progressive Scottish Opinion, the pollster that carried out last week’s Scottish Daily Mail Glasgow East poll, the information has been released to me within the past hour and two things stand out:- Although respondents were asked how they voted at the general election this does not appear to have been used to weight the sample. The stated weightings were that it should be “be representative of…
When is the best time to get your bet on? I have no idea who is going to win the Glasgow East by election on Thursday. The latest poll at the weekend gives it to Labour by a whopping 17% margin but comes from a pollster that is not a British Polling Council member and so far has ignored my written requests for the data and the detail on how the survey was carried out. The failure to provide PB…
Could the worst now be over for Labour? The July poll from ICM for the Guardian is out this evening and shows a small recovery for Labour. After June’s 20% deficit the July poll has it down to just 15%. It says something about the current political environment that this should be seen as good news for Brown and his ministers. Even so such a poll, if repeated in a general election, would according to the Anthony Wells calculator, produce…
Why does the Corporation operate as though the firm doesn’t exist? Each month the BBC’s political research editor, David Cowling, “reviews the political opinion polls published in the UK”. It’s a moderately interesting piece but there’s one oddity – polls from the internet firm YouGov which put the traditional pollsters to shame in the London Mayoral race never seem to get a mention. I’ve scanned through each of his pieces for every month this year and I cannot find any…
Do these 95-97 ICM polls undermine the swing-back theorists? Anybody trying to predict whether Brown’s Labour has any chance at all of turning things round should look at the above table very carefully. For it shows all the Guardian’s ICM surveys for the period from 21 months before the May 1 1997 general election which, of course, brought Blair’s Labour to power in a landslide. Just compare the polling figures from the August of 1995 with what happened at the…